Can’t Update in WordPress – Missing Archive File

April 5, 2013

Working on a lot of WordPress sites, I’ve never encountered this till this point. The first clue was that I couldn’t just install plugins from the plugin library, i had to install them manually. However, updating had the same problem. Noted, this was the first wordpress site we had installed on a windows server, so that probably messed with how plugins in WordPress work. Anyways, manually doing things is a bit time consuming so I looked into the error…

(-4) : Missing archive file ‘C:\Windows\TEMP/formidable-1.tmp’

The solution turned out to be pretty simple

  1. You need to ftp your server. Inside the wp content folder, create a new directory/folder called TEMP.
  2. open the wp-config.php in the root directory and enter the following code at the bottom (remember the semicolon ^_^)
define('WP_TEMP_DIR', ABSPATH . 'wp-content/TEMP');

That’s it! You can install and update plugins with no problems
[Source]

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