Install/update WordPress plugins without providing FTP access?

WordPress will only prompt you for your FTP connection information while trying to install plugins or a WordPress update if it cannot write to /wp-content directly.

Now, if for some reason you do not want to rely on the automatic check for which filesystem method to use, you can define a constant, 'FS_METHOD' in your wp-config.php file, that is either 'direct', 'ssh', 'ftpext' or 'ftpsockets' and it will use that method.

then add this to your wp-config.php file:


 define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

Permissions explained here:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress#Automatic_Update
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions