Unable to download the WordPress package on a Plesk server: Please try again later or contact the server administrator.

Symptoms

• Upon updating WordPress, a plugin or a theme via WP Toolkit, the following error appears:

  Unable to download the WordPress 6.5.5 package from https://wordpress.org/. Please try again later or contact the server administrator.

• Downloading WordPress manually will work:

  # curl -O https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
  # wget https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

• Upon enabling Plesk debug, the following error can be seen:

  [2024-08-08 20:10:40.771] 20059:66b509f2b6e92 ERR [extension/wp-toolkit] All 3 attempts to download WordPress 6.5.5 package were failed with the following errors:
  Attempt 1: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 8679004 out of 26192669 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.5.5.zip
  Attempt 2: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 8711776 out of 26192669 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.5.5.zip
  Attempt 3: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 15000 milliseconds with 8662624 out of 26192669 bytes received (see https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html) for https://wordpress.org/wordpress-6.5.5.zip

Cause

By default, WP Toolkit has a standard HTTP timeout of 15 seconds.

# plesk ext wp-toolkit --config -operation list | grep httpTimeout
httpTimeout 15

In conditions where the network is slow to download files, this may not be sufficient time to download the file.

Resolution

1. Change standard timeout to a higher amount, for example:

   # plesk ext wp-toolkit --config -operation set -option-name httpTimeout -option-value 60

   Note: if 60 seconds is still not enough, increase time further.

2. Verify the network conditions to ensure download speeds are optimal.