JFolder::create: Could not create directory

Question

I use Joomla 2.5.4 and I experienced a few days ago, that I cannot upload new extensions, plugins. It has worked perfectly earlier, I haven't modified anything.

JFolder::create: Could not create directory Path: /home/users

Root directory: /home/users/45322/web/userpage02, it is already set on admin panel. Why should Joomla write to /home/users/ instead of /home/users/45322/web/userpage02/*

Answer 1

This is usually a directory permissions issue with the tmp folder. When installing extensions, the tmp folder is used by the extensions installer, to extract the uploaded archived file. Therefore, the folder needs to exist and be writable.

A good place to find out if your Joomla folders are writable is by checking in the:

System Information -> Directory Permissions.

• In Joomla 2.5 is under the Site Menu item.
• in Joomla 3- under the System menu item.

Generally, directory permissions issues can occur either by the actual permissions on a given folder, which can be wrong owner or read/write values, or if a specified directory doesn't exist at all.

For the tmp folder, make sure that there is the correct path folder defined in Joomla Configuration.

In cPanel hosting this usually is something like:

"/home/username/tmp"

Answer 2

You can change the owner of Joomla folders to your apache server user.

You can find the apache server user with the following command:

ps aux | grep -v root | grep apache | cut -d\  -f1 | sort | uniq

Source: https://serverfault.com/questions/125865/finding-out-what-user-apache-is-running-as

For Ubuntu, it's www-data.

After you know the apache user name, then you can change the owner of all the folders and files of your Joomla installation. You can use the following command to do so:

(I suppose that your apache user is www-data)

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/joomla

If you are already inside your Joomla directory, then you can run the following command:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .