How To Correctly Set the File Permissions in Laravel 5

Setting the proper file permission for any web application is an important part of web hosting. In this tutorial, you will learn how to properly configure file permissions on a Laravel application hosted on Linux web server.

First of all, Identify the user name under which web server is running. Here are some default cases

• Nginx on Linux uses account – www-data
• Apache on Debian systems uses account – www-data
• Apache on Redhat systems uses account – apache

We assume our web server is running with account www-data. Now change the owner and group-owner for all files and directories recursively.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/laravel

Now set the permission 644 for all files and 755 for all directories. Execute the following command.

sudo find /path/to/laravel -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
sudo find /path/to/laravel -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To make Laravel work properly, you need to give read and write permissions to the web server for storage, cache and any other directories. So run the following commands:

cd /path/to/laravel
sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache

Now, your Laravel application is secured with proper permissions. But as all the files have owner and group-owner to web server, you may face an issue during changes via FTP/sFTP. To solve this problem add your user to the web server user group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data ubuntu

All done.