A remedy to the “unable to locate WordPress Root directory” error.

Tutorials October 21, 2009

WordPress today threw me an unexpected curve ball with the following error:

Unable to locate WordPress Root directory.

Installation Failed

I could not delete nor upgrade any plugin nor upgrade the fresh 2.8.4 install to WordPress version 2.8.5 - it always failed with not finding the root directory.

After having installed 50+ WordPress blogs since 2003, this really stumped me. At first I thought my paths are not correct as I was installing into a sub-domain or the wrong host name. But all was right. Then I did a Google search and found a ton of hits. And a few suggested solutions. Non of them worked, not even adding the tidbit of code to the config.php file. Then I began blaming WordPress 2.8.4 because all installs before that had not been troublesome.

As nothing, literally nothing, seemed to fix the problem I manually upgraded, hoping that with version 2.8.5 the problem would vanish. Of course it did not.

Finally I had the bright idea to double-check not the path nor the host but the USER NAME which I was using for the automatic upgrade.

BINGO.

Lo and behold - slapping my forehead - I had managed to use my WordPress installation admin name which in this case was not the same as my FTP user name.

Correcting this handled the problem.

Why WordPress did not bark at me, I don’t know - possibly because what I used was a user name - but I would expect it to be able to catch such an error just as well as it does with wrongly submitted passwords. In this case, it did not.