This article was orig­i­nally about auto­matic updates over SSH2 not work­ing for me when I upgraded to Word­Press 2.8. Word­Press 2.9 is out now, and this prob­lem turned out not to be their fault.

After fil­ing a bug report and work­ing through it with the Word­Press team, a solu­tion was even­tu­ally found (see the final update to this post). If you're not inclined to skip to the end then here is a spoiler: turn off open_basedir or make the dec­la­ra­tion less restrictive.

If you're not expe­ri­enc­ing this prob­lem (and Google says you're land­ing here if you're look­ing for help set­ting up SFTP/SSH updat­ing for Word­Press), I don't think this write-up will be of much help. But feel free to stick around; I've got snacks!

Con­tinue Reading →