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I have Drupal 8 running on localhost on macOS Catalina. When I try to install a module, I get prompted to enter ftp credentials (which I don't know). See the following screenshot.

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I've seen solutions that suggest this ftp prompt is caused by a permission issue in sites/default folder and can be fixed with chown www-data sites/default or chown apache sites/default for linux but those commands on a mac throw 'chown: www-data: illegal user name' or 'chown: apache: illegal user name' error. What do I need to do to enable installing modules/themes without being prompted for ftp?

EDIT

I'm specifically asking about installing modules by the url method from the admin interface.

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  • Did you use Composer to install Drupal or did you download a Zip? Consider using Composer. If you downloaded a Zip you do the same for modules. Go to drupal.org, download the Zip, unpack it into the modules/contrib folder, and then enable it from the UI. – leymannx Aug 30 '20 at 20:45
  • @leymannx, I installed drupal using the zip package. I'm aware of the manual install of modules, but I'm wondering why the url install method from the GUI doesn't work. Bear with me as I'm just familiarizing myself with drupal – Moses Machua Aug 31 '20 at 2:50
  • @leymannx, thanks for your attempt to help. However I think you missed the gist of my question so let me rephrase it. Drupal 8 allows installing modules from the Extend menu by pasting the module url. See this youtube video. On the video, the update manager does not ask for ftp credentials and just installs the module. Mine prompts for ftp login. What is my local installation missing? I understand there's many ways to install modules but I'm specifically asking about the url method. – Moses Machua Sep 2 '20 at 0:34
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    On Mac www-data does not exist, if you are running it on localhost you likely want to chown as _www instead. – Kevin Sep 3 '20 at 13:51
  • Also want to add that in Drupal 8 the contrib modules are stored in the [project root]/modules directory, though you can put them in [project root]/sites/default/modules or a site specific folder like [project root]/sites/example.dev/modules – Ryan Price Sep 3 '20 at 16:19
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Depending on how you are running this locally (native, Docker, etc) this can differ, but I will assume you are using what comes with macOS to run Drupal.

The difference here is Mac does not have a www-data or apache user like Linux does. If you are running with the defaults, the user you are looking for is _www (unless you have modified this in Apache confs).

So, you will want to do:

chown _www (directory)

Technically, this is probably better asked on ServerFault, but I can imagine there are a lot of people trialling or demoing Drupal who just use what is on Mac to do it, and will come across this post finding it helpful.

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  • Thanks Kevin. That worked. To make it clear, with terminal open in drupal root folder, I entered, sudo chown _www sites/default. – Moses Machua Sep 3 '20 at 19:59

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