WordPress Automatic Update Issues

When trying to use WordPress automatic update I got this error ‘Error: There was an error connecting to the server, Please verify the settings are correct.’, after trying multiple attempts to rid myself of the problem I had a eureka moment. I thought to myself, “what if it Apache wasn’t seeing the right permissions of the folders?”, and low and behold that was the problem.

Apache was expecting the owner of the folders in the document root to be www-data, I figured this is for some form of security purposes.

How I got rid of the problem

I got rid of the problem by changing the group and owner of my WordPress install folder in apache root to www-data by executing the following command:

cd /yourwordpress_dir/

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data *