XF 2.3 Unable to update addons

[Spectral-Brain]

I have updated a few times and am now needing to update some addons but get the error

Cannot install from archive as not all required directories are writable. Various directories must be writable by the web server user to install from an archive. In addition to the XF root directory, some or all of the following paths must be writable: js, src/addons, styles, src/XF/Repository/AddOnRepository.php.

I have made sure that those directories are 0755 and that AddOnRepository.php is 644. I have also made sure the owner is nginx which is what my webserver runs under as well as php-fpm. I do see that there was another post here back in 2023 where someone had the same issue and a staff member asked them to try again and it worked. Is there a remote toggle that needs to be done for this to work for me?

 

[benFF]

This started happening to me in September, nothing on the server had changed.

XF 2.2 Thread 'Has the addon uploader been changed in the last few patches?'

Sep 16, 2026

Since I updated XF with the latest patches (.19 - not sure exactly when it started), I can no longer use the inbuilt addon uploader, it gives an error message saying the file can't be written.

Normal attachments on the forum work fine - and I can also see the addon zip uploaded to the temp folder (and extracted to read in the name).

Checked file and folder permissions of course and they all seem ok (it's a Windows box)

So yes, my question is just did anything change in the code regarding addon uploads?

• benFF
• Replies: 1
• Forum: Installation, upgrade, and import support

 

[smallwheels]

I ran into this issue recently on a freshly set up test install, the root cause was stupidity. I had changed the file owner to nginx correctly via "chown -R nginx:nginx $xf-installdir/*" as well as permissions but had however failed to do so on the (in this case) existing public dir of the nginx v-host itself (which was the install dir in this case) that had wrong permissions/ownership. Maybe worth checking.