This is probably the first time I’m trying to upgrade WordPress using the automatic upgrade option available in the WordPress Admin Dashboard. And doing so showed this error message:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.6.zip.
Download failed.: Could not create Temporary file
Installation Failed

Searching the Web lead me to the following thread at WordPress Forums:

WordPress › Support » Download failed.: Could not create Temporary file

What did actually work was setting the permissions (CHMOD) for wp-content folder to 777, using the FTP client (FileZilla) I use. Once WordPress was upgraded successfully, I changed the permissions back to 755.

This issue seems to occur only in Apache servers where Safe_Mode is On. You can read about that at Download failed – Could not create Temporary file | shantopagla.


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4 Comments

  1. said this on Thursday, December 30th 2010 5:51 am

    a simple solution that worked for me… just crate a folder and call it “tmp”. create this folder in the wordpress root directory. that solved it for me :-)

  2. said this on Tuesday, August 24th 2010 5:55 pm

    Thanks it solved my problems to update the plug ins manually via ftp.

  3. zeally7
    said this on Saturday, July 31st 2010 9:55 pm

    Thank you !

  4. Tom
    said this on Wednesday, April 21st 2010 8:32 pm

    Thanks for the tip. I was having the same problem and used your solution to get around this issue.

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