I have a local wordpress installation and got everything working, until I tried to install a new plugin. Trying to activate the plugin, wordpress asked me for FTP connection information, which I understood to be a failure of write-access to the plugins directory. Apache runs as www-data, so I ran sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/wordpress to make the wordpress directory writable for Apache. But now, I cannot edit the files as user anymore. Changing file permissions back to chown -R user: /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes, the wordpress dashboard complains again, that it doesn't have sufficient access.

I tried various "solutions" online, but none have worked so far. Do I really need to install something like proftp and create an FTP user & password for my local server? Or can I circumvent the problem with some nifty file permission settings, which allow both me and Apache to access/write the files?