WordPress asking for my FTP credentials to install plugins

Try to add the code in wp-config.php:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

If during installation of a plugin, Wordpress asks for your hostname or FTP details. Then follow these steps:

Login to your server and navigate to /var/www/html/wordpress/. Open wp-config.php and add this line after define(‘DB_COLLATE’)

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

If you get "Could not create directory" error. Give write permissions to your wordpress directory in recursive as

chmod -R go+w wordpress

NOTE. For security, revoke these permissions once you install a plugin as

chmod -R go-w wordpress

If you are using Ubuntu.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data PATH_TO_YOUR_WORDPRESS_FOLDER

"Whenever you use the WordPress control panel to automatically install, upgrade, or delete plugins, WordPress must make changes to files on the filesystem.

Before making any changes, WordPress first checks to see whether or not it has access to directly manipulate the file system.

If WordPress does not have the necessary permissions to modify the filesystem directly, you will be asked for FTP credentials so that WordPress can try to do what it needs to via FTP."

Solution: In order to find out what user your instance of apache is running as, create a test script with the following content:

<?php echo(exec("whoami")); ?>

For me, it was daemon and not www-data. Then, fix the permission by:

sudo chown -R daemon /path/to/your/local/www/folder