Updating your Blog-In-A-Box system to allow themes and plugins to be installed

Jamie Whitehorn -

I have a home blog that's currently hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3 using Automattic's Blog-In-A-Box WordPress system. So far I've only come across one limitation. When I tried to install a new theme, I was promoted for an FTP user-id and password. I tried various combinations of the user-id's and passwords that had been set during the installation process, but didn't have any luck. The standard Raspberry Pi doesn't come with an FTP server installed by default, but I thought the Blog-In-A-Box my have added one.

Fortunately a quick google got me a result on how to modify the Blog-In-A-Box install to allow direct upload via the web interface :-)

I found some instructions on Instructables - "Blog in a Box – Raspberry Pi WordPress Complete Setup Guide". There are some typos in the original instructions so I'm reproducing them here.

As a preliminary you'll need some of the info from the Blog-In-A-Box setup.

  1. Physically login to the Raspberry Pi or SSH into it, using the user-id 'pi' and the password in box 6.
  2. Type in cd wordpressand press [ENTER]
  3. Now we need to edit one of the config files, the easiest way to do this is to use nano
  4. Type in sudo nano wp-config.php and press [ENTER]
  5. Scroll down to the line that contains 'DB collate'
  6. Create a new line underneath it by pressing [ENTER]
  7. Type in define( 'FS_METHOD', 'direct' );
  8. Press ctrl-X, then type Y and press [ENTER], that will save the file and put you back at the command line.
  9. Now type sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/wordpress/wp-content/ and press [ENTER]
  10. Finally type sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/wordpress and press [ENTER]

If everything has gone according to plan you should now be able to install themes and plugins directly from the web interface on your Blog-In-A-Box :-).

I am going to have a bit more of a play with this, because the idea behind Blog-In-A-Box is to give people a full development environment with everything they need to develop with WordPress and Node.

Not being able to upload new themes or plugins is a bit of a limitation on that. This implies I've missed something somewhere. If I find anything, I'll post it here.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
— Wayne Dyer