Magento Connect Permissions
If you access Magento Connect and it’s telling you to check the write permissions (see image below), there’s a simple way to fix this.
Open up your SSH client and go to the directory where Magento is installed. Once you are there, copy and paste the following command:
- find . -type d -exec chmod 777 {} \;
* If you are on a cPanel server you need to do this
- find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
(or just go to your file manager and choose 755
YOUR MAGENTO SITE ON CPANEL WILL NOT WORK WITH PERMISSIONS SET TO 777
That will change the permissions on all the directories to writable, and you should be able to use Magento Connect now.
You may also need to change the permissions on the pear download file to be able to properly install Magento Connect packages:
- chmod 777 downloader/pearlib/download/package.xml
Magento Connect write permissions error 
After you’ve done what you’ve need to do in Magento Connect, reset your permissions.
NOTE: You will typically see this error in hosting environments where PHP is running as an Apache module (mod_php, DSO). That means, when you try to use Magento Connect, it’s going to run as user nobody instead of your username. You must use SSH to upgrade Magento.
