WordPress sftp automatic update – Could not find the wp-content directory

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I am trying to configure the sftp automatic update on WordPress. It does not work: I always got “wp-content can not be found”.

The configuration I have is as follow:

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  • each site has its owned user
  • the site is located under user home directory : /home/{user}/www
  • the user is chrooted to its home directory : /home/{user}

sftp is working ok for my user (using command line or software like filezilla).

In wordpress config, I got the below parameter: 

define('FS_METHOD', 'ssh2');
define('FTP_HOST', '127.0.0.1:22');
define('FTP_USER', 'test');
define('FTP_PASSWD', '');
define('FTP_PUBKEY','/home/test/wp-rsa.pub');
define('FTP_PRIKEY','/home/test/wp-rsa');

This unfortunately does not work. During update, wordpress can not found the wp-content directory.

Issue is that the ABSPATH is equal to /home/{user}/www but through sftp it should only be /www (due to chrooted).
I trie to use the FTP_BASE configuration variable but after looking the WordPress code, it looks like that in case of sftp connection, it does not care about the value of FTP_BASE 🙁

I read many articles on the web about the sftp settings but none seems to use the chrooted mechanism.

So is there a way to make wordpress automatic update works with my settings?

Thx in advance!!

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  1. I was able to make it work by also chrooting the SFTP user.

    1. I have this at the very end of my /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

      Subsystem sftp internal-sftp

      Match Group sftp-only
      ChrootDirectory %h
      ForceCommand internal-sftp
      AllowTcpForwarding no

    …don’t forget to comment out any other instance of ‘Subsystem sftp’.
    Restart sshd.
    Also note that this will allow only SFTP for any user that’s a member of the ‘sftp-only’ group – no plain SSH shell. If you want to allow plain ssh sessions as well, try removing the ‘ForceCommand’ entry – haven’t try it but should work.

    1. Add the user to the ‘sftp-only’ group, e.g.:

      addgroup sftp-only
      usermod -G sftp-only -a {user}

    3.In /etc/passwd set the home of the user to be the same as the PHP’s chroot folder, in your case they both will be /home/{user} I think and no change will be needed, but in my case I have the PHP chroot set as /home/{user}/php and I got to change that to match in /etc/password for the entry for {user}.
    4. Make sure any component of the path to that home is owned by root so the SFTP chroot function allows the login – in this case both /home and /home/{user} must be owned by root.
    5. Try to SFTP with FileZilla – make sure you now see only inside the user’s home/chroot.

    For me, after unifying what SFTP and PHP see as their path, the SFTP plugin now worked as expected. Of course the SFTP {user} must have write rights over the WP root.

    GL