WordPress Permalinks Issue

1 minute read

Description:

Many people seem to have this issue where you create a WordPress site and then when you go to change the site URL structure under “Permalinks”, the site is unable to change it due to permissions.

To Resolve:

  1. First thing to figure out is which directory is the root of your website. Doing a generic install it is /var/www/html for Apache.

  2. Copy the code it gives you on the WordPress page. Create that file in the directory from step 1 and gave it full permissions (temporarily):

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    cd /var/www/html
sudo touch .htaccess
sudo pluma .htaccess
    • paste in code from above and save.

  3. It said to change permission to apache:apache and run:

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    sudo chmod 777 .htaccess
sudo chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/*
sudo service httpd restart

  4. This should’ve done the trick. But what really happened is once I saved, I got a bunch of AVC Denied errors from Selinux on my Centos VM. So I had to look that up

  5. I started thinking, maybe if it’s not just SELinux, but maybe some configuration for Apache.

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    # I ran the following along with the previous steps and it seemed to work. But the links weren't actually changing.
sudo setenforce 0

# I then ran the following and it still didn't work. Rebooted.
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t '.htaccess' 

# I then ran the following in /var/www/html to confirm. Still didn't work.
chcon --type httpd_sys_rw_content_t /var/www/html/.htaccess
ls -alZ

# I started thinking, maybe if it's not just SELinux, but maybe some configuration for Apache.
cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

# Look for
<Directory /path/to/site>
AllowOverride None
</Directory>

# Add/change the following setting to allow .htaccess in your web directory to work:
AllowOverride FileInfo

# Restart the daemon
sudo service restart httpd

# This resolved it!

# NOTE: I've also read that you may have to enable the "mod_rewrite" module: 
sudo a2enmod rewrite; sudo service apache2 restart

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