Warning: Your Magento folder does not have sufficient write permissions in Magento Connect

Please note: Read to the bottom of the article before using any code snippets from this content.

Sometimes you may see the following error in red at the top of Magento Connect when logging in:-

Warning: Your Magento folder does not have sufficient write permissions.

This will prevent you from carrying out anything within Magento Connect so it is best to temporarily set all directory permissions to CHMOD 777 until you have finished in Magento Connect which you can change using the below command in your server terminal (SSH):-

find . -type d -exec chmod 777 {} \;

Don’t forget to reset all permissions back afterwards which you can change using the below command in your server terminal (SSH):-

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc
chmod 550 mage
chmod -R o+w media

Or better still, with these even more secure permissions for Magento.

The above global permissions change is just a quick-fix/workaround and there will of course be a different permissions issue causing the issue.

Usually, it requires changing the owner of the root directory in which Magento is installed to the same as the downloader directory, like apache for example. That’s definitely worth a shot before trying out the above.