By Tanya S on

anyone know what this means? and how I can sort it out?

thanks

Comments

dman’s picture

dman commented

the problem

  • The directory files/images is not writable
  • it does not have the correct permissions set

if that was too complicated...

  • A directory is a place on the server where files are kept
  • The directory called files/images is not writable by the Drupal (web) service
  • This is because the pseudo user that the Drupal web service runs as has not been granted the ability to write to that location
  • file permissions are what say who can write things to where on any given system

to fix

  • Grant write access permission to the Drupal web user to that directory

How you do that depends on several things you didn't describe in your post - such as :

  • What platform you've installed it on
  • What access you have to the server
  • What is the current ownership status of the files/images directory
  • How you put the Drupal files there in the first place
  • Whether you know how to use the command line (CHMOD)
  • Whether you know how to use an FTP program (CHMOD)

The short answer is probably

chmod -R g+w files/*

The long answer is do some research on what file permissions are. Once you find that out, the answer is obvious.

.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

Tanya S’s picture

Tanya S commented

I have looked into changing the permissions but:

When I go to the file manager on the server through the cpanel I have only an option to change the permissions on the public_html directory(which is where the files/images along with many other files are) these are files that were there when I installed Drupal. This is the file that I upload all my images to, using the ftp client.

I have only recently been getting the error message and have not changed any file permissions before.

Therefore I have gone to 'Change permissions' for the public_html directory and all the boxes for user, group and world are ticked to allow anyone to read, write and execute. Therefore how can I possibly change the permissions to make the files/images directory writable? Or am I in the wrong place?

pobster’s picture

pobster commented

Not that I use cpanel myself but I understand that random problems do seem to occur frequently... Try running the cleanup script in the tools folder.

There's a sort of guide thingy here: http://andrew.absurdlycool.com/class/l3.html#Changing%20file%20permissions

...But I'm not sure it'll help much... Good luck! ;o)

Pobster