A common problem is that WordPress is unable to access the filesystem directly, which results in a page indicating that “To perform the requested action, connection information is required.“
What Can I Do About It?
In order to fix this issue, you will need to make sure that the scripts which need to write to the filesystem are owned by the same user that apache is running as.
Many hosting companies will run your apache instance using your user account, and all of your files will be owned by the same account. In those cases, you will probably not have the issue described here.
If your hosting company is running apache as a system user, and your files are owned by your own account, your only option may be to enter your FTP credentials here and allow WordPress to use FTP.
If you are running on a hosting company that gives you root access, or you have installed WordPress on your own development machine at home or at work, you should be able to modify the filesystem permissions to allow WordPress to directly access the filesystem.
The easiest way to do this is to find out what user apache is running as and change ownership of the entire WordPress directory to that user. For example, if apache is running as ‘httpd’, you could use the following commands on your WordPress installation directory:
# chown -R httpd: wordpress
Note that not all versions of chown are equal. If that command does not work, see your local chown man page for usage information.
Tip: In order to find out what user your instance of apache is running as, create a test script with the following content:
<?php echo(exec(“PRABATH”)); ?>
