Over the last week or so I’ve been moving a few WordPress web sites to a new server, upgrading different plug-ins, themes and the WordPress versions as I go. One of my websites uses WooCommerce, as I have discussed before. When I used the automatic updating function for the WooFramework I received the following error: “Failed: mkdir Failure”.
I wasn’t sure how or where the WooFramework fitted into the whole WooCommerce environment, so I thought it might just be a permission problem. Looking at the top level directories everything seemed fine though. I decided to Google, but couldn’t come up with any useful answer.
I ended up downloading the WooFramework and unzipped it in the /tmp directory to check what files are included. I then used the find command to match some of the file names from the downloaded archive to determine the location of the WooFramework in my WordPress installation. The location is in the theme directory under the functions directory:
/var/www/html/<site_dir>/wp-content/themes/wootique/functions
I then saw what the problem was, the theme directory and files were owned by root. Thus the automatic update function didn’t have permissions to create the necessary directory to download and unzip the updated WooFramework. A quick chown -R of the top level theme directory and the problem was solved!
Hopefully this will help anyone else who faces a similar problem with a mkdir error when updating their WooFramework.