WordPress Updating with FTP
To update wordpress from admin area, you need to be running web server as the user owning files. This is not possible when you run PHP as apache module.
To fix this, you need to edit your wp-config.php and add following to end of the file.
define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpext'); define('FTP_USER', 'FTP_USERNAME'); define('FTP_PASS', 'FTP_PASSWORD'); define('FTP_HOST', 'localhost'); define('FTP_SSL', false);
You can read about about this at
https://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#WordPress_Upgrade_Constants
Above configuration work fine for me when files are inside public_html folder of FTP homed directory.