WordPress on Xampp is great for local development but for the longest time I have been annoyed with the automatic updates not working in Xampp/Wordpress installations. This not only includes WordPress version updates but also updating WordPress plugins on Xampp installations.
The problem I experienced was a permissions mismatch as per this post by Ianc. For me these instructions didn’t work but after persisting I discovered that the htdocs folder has to have its owner/group the same as the one you change to in your httpd.conf.
Instructions for enabling WordPress automatic updates in Xampp on OS X:
- Find your admin user name for this OS X account.
- Change permissions and owner/group on htdocs folder.
- You may of already changed your htdocs and its contents to 777 to avoid being unable to edit any files without authenticating. If not change chmod to 777.
- If you have Pathfinder, you can easily change owner of htdocs folder to yourUserName with the Inspector (cmd+i with folder selected).
- With Pathfinder again, change htdocs group to “staff”.
I could not find an easy way to change the owner/group with just the regular Finder though it may be possible. Another alternative is to use whatever the user/group is of the folder as the details in your httpd.conf (haven’t tested this but it should work).
- Change your httpd.conf user and group.
- Open your httpd.conf file with Textedit. you can find it in Applications/XAMPP/etc/
- Find “user” and change it from nobody to yourUserName
- Below that line, change group from admin to staff
- Test your automatic update ability.
