How to Change WordPress Default Upload Folder and URL DOMAIN

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This behavior has been removed from WordPress, so if you need to change the default folder location for uploaded files or images, we need to change wp-config.php or set using wp-cli. The default folder is wp-content/uploads, let say we want to change that to /var/www/images.DOMAIN.com on the same server and set the URL for files https://images.DOMAIN.com

Install Dependency

We’ll need curl to download the wp-cli file

sudo apt install curl -y

Download WordPress CLI

Download the latest WordPress CLI from the Github

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wp-cli/builds/gh-pages/phar/wp-cli.phar

move these file to /usr/local/bin

sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

set the file permission to executable, so we don’t need to run wp-cli using php /usr/local/bin/wp 

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/wp

Change WordPress Setting

My current WordPress located at /var/www/DOMAIN.com. Debian use www-data as default user for nginx or apache, replace with your webserver user.

# move to WordPress folder
cd /var/www/DOMAIN.com
sudo -u www-data wp option set upload_path /var/www/images.DOMAIN.com
sudo -u www-data wp option set upload_url_path https://images.DOMAIN.com

Create the folder for upload

mkdir /var/www/images.DOMAIN.com

copy data from old location to new location

cp -r /var/www/DOMAIN.com/wp-content/uploads/* /var/www/images.DOMAIN.com/

Setting Web Server

The last part of this setup is to add vhost (server block) for domain images.DOMAIN.com.
Set A record for DNS images.DOMAIN.com to Server IP. I use nginx, here’s my config

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name images.DOMAIN.com;
    return 301 https://images.DOMAIN.com$request_uri;
}
 
server {
    listen 443 http2 ssl;
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/DOMAIN/fullchain.cer;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/DOMAIN/images.DOMAIN.com.key;
    server_name images.DOMAIN.com;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/images.DOMAIN.com.error_log;
    root /var/www/images.DOMAIN.com/;
    index index.htm index.html;
}

reload the Nginx then check your WordPress, the images should be served using images.DOMAIN.com domain.

Verify by checking https://DOMAIN.com/wp-admin/options-media.php
wordpress uploading files location

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