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Notice: this post was last updated 4 years 2 weeks ago so it might be outdated. Please be cautious before implementing any of suggestions herein.

Running Drupal simpletests from the command line and the "Could not upload file" problem

I am using Simpletests for my site which check for file upload functionality. The problem is that uploading files requires sites/*/files to be owned by the web user (www in my case). When running simpletests, files are uploaded to a temporary directory sites/*/files/simpletest/*, which also needs to be owned by the web user (www).

When running your tests via the command line (in my case with the user jenkins), your command-line user needs to be able to write to sites/*/files/simpletest.

My solution has been to use the visudo file to allows jenkins to run drush under the www user (on a test environment), and then run my tests in the command but under www.

sudo -u _www drush test-run 'mysite deploy' -y

To avoid permissions problems, sites/*/files/simpletest must also be owned by www, but jenkins needs to be in a group that has write access to that directory.