Recommended permissions setting for WordPress in MAMP PRO

After unsuccessful googling for how to resolve the issue of WordPress asking for FTP credentials on local installations, I finally arrived at a set of working permissions for MAMP Pro in OSX.

WordPress recommends CHMOD / file permissions of 755 for directories and 644 for files, but what I didn’t know of the top of my head was how that correlates to MAMP’s settings. I figured that out, but WordPress still wasn’t updating correctly. Then, I found this WordPress support thread where people said electronicink’s solution worked for them. Following Yosemite, OSX/macOS File Sharing Permissions no longer give an FTP sharing option. Back to the drawing board! The missing key was who the Owner and Group should be. www! Duh. I’d likely changed it to myself and admin in my failed attempts at manually granting access through Finder’s Get Info feature.

Anyway, here’s the combination that finally worked for me. This dialog is accessed in the Hosts tab of MAMP PRO by clicking the people icon next to the folder icon where you choose “Document root.”

Screenshot from MAMP Pro 4.4 on macOS 10.13.4, but permissions and user groups are the same across MAMP and OS versions.

8 Comments

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  1. Prae says:

    Oh wow this works a charm. Save me a lot of researching.

    Thank you! It’s really inconvenient that Yosemite and Mavrick decided to remove the FTP sharing ability.

  2. Ann says:

    If I could kiss you I would! Thanks for the info!

  3. Michel says:

    Here is very nice script i build that will handle that and much much it offers two solutions a terminal script app and a web app. Both will get latest wordpress and installed it and configure mamp to map and create your lcoal host here is the link https://github.com/michelve/wordpress-mamp-localhost-generator

  4. Carolyn says:

    By far the easiest solution I’ve found for MAMP users. Thank you!

  5. Rob says:

    YES! Thank you so much, absolutely brilliant.

  6. Patrick says:

    I have one issue with MAMP Pro in deployment to Live server.

    I cloned my development site but my permission locally is now on the Live and it returns 401. I have to go in and change the permissions, quite painful.

  7. Jonas says:

    Thanks, worked like a charm!

  8. Dan says:

    Perfect, thanks

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