Before the recent MAC OS upgrade, wordpress plugin updates were working fine on my local development environment.
Then I started getting messages like “upload failed server error” when attempting to update wordpress plugins from my local hosted wordpress sites.
At first, I made sure the permissions were correct and that the files and directories had the proper owner. But this is did not fix the issue.
This is when I realized that something must have changed in the apache set up.
For now, I am still using PHP 5 on these local servers (soon switching to 7)
The apache configuration file had been silently altered by the Mac OS update!
Apple makes a backup of the existing apache configuration file before replacing it.
Performing a command line diff, I was able to see what had changed.
diff httpd.conf.bak httpd.conf 169c169 < #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so --- > LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so had been commented out!
Uncommented the load module command for php5_module (or whatever PHP version you are using) finally restored the upload functionality of my local server.
I hope this helps someone find the answer to this issue a little faster!