How To Correctly Set the File Permissions in Laravel

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 a Linux web server.

First of all, Identify the user name under which the 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 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 webserver user group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data ubuntu

All done.