Unable to install package because "directory is not writable"

[Mr Robville]

Hi all,
Yes, I have received the dreaded "You cannot download or install new packages because the Packages directory or one of the files in it are not writable!" error when trying to install the 2.0.8 update, but I've searched high and low and none of the solutions seem to work.

Firstly, my package manager used to work fine, but I've recently moved my forum to a new host and I'm unable to use the package manager ever since.
The most common solution I find is changing the file permissions from the packages and temp folder to 777 or something like that. I think my whole forum is set to 777 by now and still it refuses to work. Also the temp folder exists within the packages directory.

Then I've checked the installation paths of the website and they all seem to be corrected properly. However, since the problem arose after I moved the site I suspect I've forgot to check one of the directories.

Does anyone know how to solve this? Am I perhaps missing something?

In case it's of importance, my forum site is included within a hosting package of another site. It's a subdomain if I'm correct.

[kat]

I think you need to slap your host about, a bit...

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=499374.0

[Mr Robville]

Thanks a lot, I'll contact him right away and let you know if that fixed the problem!
I would never guess that my permission settings could be 'fake'.

However, the changed permissions do seem to work for the avatars folder, settings.php and other files. When these were all set to ,0,0,0 I received a couple errors indicating that these files/folders were not writeable. As soon as I changed them to 755 or 777, the error disappeared. So it seems to work for some files.

[Illori]

can you try creating a temp folder and backup folder in the packages folder and see if that helps any?

[kat]

So it seems to work for some files.

Some things just need permissions to "modify" files, whereas others require you to "own" them.

Some documentation, which explains:

http://www.unixtutorial.org/2014/07/difference-between-chmod-and-chown

[Mr Robville]

Thanks a lot!
I've sent an email to my host. Hopefully I'll get an answer soon.

can you try creating a temp folder and backup folder in the packages folder and see if that helps any?

Temp and Backup are both already included and CHMOD'ed to 777. There were two files included within the temp btw. Both were related to the 2.0.8 patch, but removing them did not solve the problem.

[Illori]

you mean temp and backup? both in lower case? if your server is linux/unix it is case sensitive and the name matters.

[Mr Robville]

Oh whow, that did the trick!  I feel like an idiot.
The temp folder had a capital letter. Strange that it worked before though. Anyway, changing the capital letter to a lower case made the error disappear.

Thanks a lot guys!