Managing file and folder permissions for wordpress in live server.

You have developed a site on wordpress and then have uploaded the site onto the live server. Then after fixing all the database conections and the site url. You test your website.

Then snap!

500 forbidden error occurs. Or the browser fails to load the page due to some redirection error or such.

This may be caused by improper permission to the files of the project.

While in the local server, the permissions don’t matter much (except you are working on a Linux/Unix system where you change the permission of the file and folders in the local system) and the site works fine. Then when uploading the files and folders they get uploaded with the same permissions as that in the local system.

But the server configurations and the local system file configurations are little different and thus the server fails to load the files properly if the permissions have not been properly managed.

First check the .htaccess file’s permissions.

The htaccess file should have permission of 644 (-rw-r–r–) or 755(-rwxr-xr-x).

Permissions any other than this may cause the file to be inaccessible to the server.

Also for any other files and the folders the permissions should be 755(-rwxr-xr-x).

The above cases have been tested only for wordpress sites but may also work for any other projects as well.