Does WordPress fail to upgrade or upload?

I had recently an issue on one of my customers website which puzzled me. I was getting an error while uploading a new media or if I tried to automatically update plugins. I was getting an ungraceful error.

Warning: touch() [function.touch]: Unable to create file /home/user/public_html/website/wp-content/tmp/filename.tmp because No such file or directory in /home/user/public_html/website/wp-admin/includes/file.php on line 177

Warning: unlink(/home/user/public_html/website/filename.tmp) [function.unlink]: No such file or directory in /home/user/public_html/website/wp-admin/includes/file.php on line 509

An error occurred while updating BackWPup: Download failed. Destination directory for file streaming does not exist or is not writable..

On the other hand, uploading a new media brought to a similar failure.

Warning: touch() [function.touch]: Unable to create file /home/user/public_html/website/wp-content/tmp/430485_368778183151054_260635637298643_1368038_1674245931_n.tmp because No such file or directory in /home/user/public_html/website/wp-admin/includes/file.php on line 177

Dismiss“430485_368778183151054_260635637298643_1368038_1674245931_n.jpg” has failed to upload due to an error

The uploaded file could not be moved to /home/user/public_html/website/wp-content/uploads/2012/02.

It showed up at first when I deployed the website, from production to the final domain. A clean installation on the same domain had not the same issue. It wasn’t theme related either. So, what was that?

I had little luck changing permissions of the folder involved. Neither setting everything up with 755 or 777 changed a thing.

The solution

Finally I found out a fix which I believe being quite bulletproof. In the config.php file, just before the line

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

I added few additional instructions.

/* Absolute path to the WordPress directory. */
if ( !defined('ABSPATH') ) { define( 'ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/' ); }

/* Setup a temporary folder for uploading and updating */
define( 'WP_TEMP_DIR', ABSPATH.'wp-content/tmp/') ;

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Done that, I do believe it’s a good idea to actually create a folder called tmp in wp-content. It’s also a good practice keeping order in the wp-content folder. That way the day you will have to backup or restore, you will know which files are temporary and not strictly necessary (probably left over of unsuccessful processes – delete!).

Let me know if the solution works for you. Happy coding!