I’ve seen a couple of solutions on this site that solved some permission problems, however, they seem that they create others, at least for me. My setup is a local wordpress installation on Ubuntu 14.04.
For example: when I want to install a plugin from within my wordpress admin area, I used to get asked to enter my FTP details. Surfing for an answer, I found that changing your user:group to www-data:www-data would solve it, and indeed it did.
However, upon making that change, my files stopped being writable from any editor. I tried adding my current user name nasser to the www-data group (I did this with sudo adduser nasser www-data) and even changed all of my file permissions to 775, but to no avail.
So now, I’m switching back and forth between owners/groups if I want to add a plugin or theme while editing. I could settle for simply downloading a plugin/theme and unzipping it manually into Even unzipping a theme/plugin and manually copying it to the appropriate location would require a permission change. wp-content/plugins or /themes
Any help would be much appreciated. If I missed any details, or was unclear, please let me know.