Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/ hosted on Linux with Nginx/Apache

This may indicate a permissions problem with your WordPress uploads directory.

Firstly please make sure that you have the right permissions on /uploads folder.

$ sudo chmod -R 755 uploads/

Then if still nothing happens, please check the owner permissions.

$ ls -l
total 24
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root       28 Jan 26 13:44 index.php
drwxr-xr-x 16 root     root     4096 Jan 26 14:50 plugins
drwxr-xr-x  7 root     root     4096 Jan 26 13:44 themes
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     root     4096 Jan 26 13:44 upgrade
drwxr-xr-x 11 root     root     4096 Jan 26 13:44 uploads

Let’s offer the right permissions. As we can see the uploads folder has the root owner. The owner of Nginx/Apache servers is www-data

$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ./uploads/

Now if you check again, the owner is changed and the permissions 755 are set.

$ ls -l
total 24
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root       28 Jan 26 13:44 index.php
drwxr-xr-x 16 root     root     4096 Jan 26 14:50 plugins
drwxr-xr-x  7 root     root     4096 Jan 26 13:44 themes
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     root     4096 Jan 26 13:44 upgrade
drwxr-xr-x 11 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 26 13:44 uploads

That’s it!

Originally published at https://whyboobo.com/devops/wordpress-upload-permissions-linux/