[php] How to set up file permissions for Laravel?

I'm using Apache Web Server that has the owner set to _www:_www. I never know what is the best practice with file permissions, for example when I create new Laravel 5 project.

Laravel 5 requires /storage folder to be writable. I found plenty of different approaches to make it work and I usually end with making it 777 chmod recursively. I know it's not the best idea though.

The official doc says:

Laravel may require some permissions to be configured: folders within storage and vendor require write access by the web server.

Does it mean that the web server needs access to the storage and vendor folders themselves too or just their current contents?

I assume that what is much better, is changing the owner instead of permissions. I changed all Laravel's files permissions recursively to _www:_www and that made the site work correctly, as if I changed chmod to 777. The problem is that now my text editor asks me for password each time I want to save any file and the same happens if I try to change anything in Finder, like for example copy a file.

What is the correct approach to solve these problems?

1. Change chmod
2. Change the owner of the files to match those of the web server and perhaps set the text editor (and Finder?) to skip asking for password, or make them use sudo
3. Change the owner of the web server to match the os user (I don't know the consequences)
4. Something else

For Laravel developers, directory issues can be a little bit pain. In my application, I was creating directories on the fly and moving files to this directory in my local environment successfully. Then on server, I was getting errors while moving files to newly created directory.

Here are the things that I have done and got a successful result at the end.

1. sudo find /path/to/your/laravel/root/directory -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
sudo find /path/to/your/laravel/root/directory -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
2. chcon -Rt httpd_sys_content_rw_t /path/to/my/file/upload/directory/in/laravel/project/
3. While creating the new directory on the fly, I used the command mkdir($save_path, 0755, true);

After making those changes on production server, I successfully created new directories and move files to them.

Finally, if you use File facade in Laravel you can do something like this: File::makeDirectory($save_path, 0755, true);

I had the following configuration:

• NGINX (running user: nginx)
• PHP-FPM

And applied permissions correctly as @bgies suggested in the accepted answer. The problem in my case was the php-fpm's configured running user and group which was originally apache.

If you're using NGINX with php-fpm, you should open php-fpm's config file:

nano /etc/php-fpm.d/www.config

And replace user and group options' value with one NGINX is configured to work with; in my case, both were nginx:

... ; Unix user/group of processes ; Note: The user is mandatory. If the group is not set, the default user's group ; will be used. ; RPM: apache Choosed to be able to access some dir as httpd user = nginx ; RPM: Keep a group allowed to write in log dir. group = nginx ...

Save it and restart nginx and php-fpm services.

Most folders should be normal "755" and files, "644"

Laravel requires some folders to be writable for the web server user. You can use this command on unix based OSs.

sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache

I found an even better solution to this. Its caused because php is running as another user by default.

so to fix this do

sudo nano /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

then edit the user = "put user that owns the directories" group = "put user that owns the directories"

then:

sudo systemctl reload php7.0-fpm

This worked for me:

cd [..LARAVEL PROJECT ROOT]
sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
sudo chmod -R 777 ./storage
sudo chmod -R 777 ./bootstrap/cache/

Only if you use npm (VUE, compiling SASS, etc..) add this:

sudo chmod -R 777 ./node_modules/

What it does:

• Change all file permissions to 644
• Change all folder permissions to 755
• For storage and bootstrap cache (special folders used by laravel for creating and executing files, not available from outside) set permission to 777, for anything inside
• For nodeJS executable, same as above

Note: Maybe you can not, or don't need, to do it with sudo prefix. it depends on your user's permissions, group, etc...

The solution posted by bgles is spot on for me in terms of correctly setting permissions initially (I use the second method), but it still has potential issues for Laravel.

By default, Apache will create files with 644 permissions. So that's pretty much anything in storage/. So, if you delete the contents of storage/framework/views, then access a page through Apache you will find the cached view has been created like:

-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 1005 Dec  6 09:40 969370d7664df9c5206b90cd7c2c79c2

If you run "artisan serve" and access a different page, you will get different permissions because CLI PHP behaves differently from Apache:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 user     www-data 16191 Dec  6 09:48 2a1683fac0674d6f8b0b54cbc8579f8e

In itself this is no big deal as you will not be doing any of this in production. But if Apache creates a file that subsequently needs to be written by the user, it will fail. And this can apply to cache files, cached views and logs when deploying using a logged-in user and artisan. A facile example being "artisan cache:clear" which will fail to delete any cache files that are www-data:www-data 644.

This can be partially mitigated by running artisan commands as www-data, so you'll be doing/scripting everything like:

sudo -u www-data php artisan cache:clear

Or you'll avoid the tediousness of this and add this to your .bash_aliases:

alias art='sudo -u www-data php artisan'

This is good enough and is not affecting security in any way. But on development machines, running testing and sanitation scripts makes this unwieldy, unless you want to set up aliases to use 'sudo -u www-data' to run phpunit and everything else you check your builds with that might cause files to be created.

The solution is to follow the second part of bgles advice, and add the following to /etc/apache2/envvars, and restart (not reload) Apache:

umask 002

This will force Apache to create files as 664 by default. In itself, this can present a security risk. However, on the Laravel environments mostly being discussed here (Homestead, Vagrant, Ubuntu) the web server runs as user www-data under group www-data. So if you do not arbitrarily allow users to join www-data group, there should be no additional risk. If someone manages to break out of the webserver, they have www-data access level anyway so nothing is lost (though that's not the best attitude to have relating to security admittedly). So on production it's relatively safe, and on a single-user development machine, it's just not an issue.

Ultimately as your user is in www-data group, and all directories containing these files are g+s (the file is always created under the group of the parent directory), anything created by the user or by www-data will be r/w for the other.

And that's the aim here.

edit

On investigating the above approach to setting permissions further, it still looks good enough, but a few tweaks can help:

By default, directories are 775 and files are 664 and all files have the owner and group of the user who just installed the framework. So assume we start from that point.

cd /var/www/projectroot
sudo chmod 750 ./
sudo chgrp www-data ./

First thing we do is block access to everyone else, and make the group to be www-data. Only the owner and members of www-data can access the directory.

sudo chmod 2775 bootstrap/cache
sudo chgrp -R www-data bootstrap/cache

To allow the webserver to create services.json and compiled.php, as suggested by the official Laravel installation guide. Setting the group sticky bit means these will be owned by the creator with a group of www-data.

find storage -type d -exec sudo chmod 2775 {} \;
find storage -type f -exec sudo chmod 664 {} \;
sudo chgrp -R www-data storage

We do the same thing with the storage folder to allow creation of cache, log, session and view files. We use find to explicitly set the directory permissions differently for directories and files. We didn't need to do this in bootstrap/cache as there aren't (normally) any sub-directories in there.

You may need to reapply any executable flags, and delete vendor/* and reinstall composer dependencies to recreate links for phpunit et al, eg:

chmod +x .git/hooks/*
rm vendor/*
composer install -o

That's it. Except for the umask for Apache explained above, this is all that's required without making the whole projectroot writeable by www-data, which is what happens with other solutions. So it's marginally safer this way in that an intruder running as www-data has more limited write access.

end edit

Changes for Systemd

This applies to the use of php-fpm, but maybe others too.

The standard systemd service needs to be overridden, the umask set in the override.conf file, and the service restarted:

sudo systemctl edit php7.0-fpm.service
Use:
    [Service]
    UMask=0002
Then:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart php7.0-fpm.service

Add to composer.json

"scripts": {
    "post-install-cmd": [
      "chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache",
      "chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache"
    ]
}

After composer install

I decided to write my own script to ease some of the pain of setting up projects.

Run the following inside your project root:

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/defaye/bootstrap-laravel/master/bootstrap.sh | sh

Wait for the bootstrapping to complete and you're good to go.

Review the script before use.

I have installed laravel on EC2 instance and have spent 3 days to fix the permission error and at last fixed it. So I want to share this experience with other one.

1. user problem When I logged in ec2 instance, my username is ec2-user and usergroup is ec2-user. And the website works under of httpd user: apache: apache so we should set the permission for apache.

2. folder and file permission A. folder structure first, you should make sure that you have such folder structure like this under storage

   storage

   • framework
     • cache
     • sessions
     • views
   • logs The folder structure can be different according to the laravel version you use. my laravel version is 5.2 and you could find the appropriate structure according to your version.

B. permission At first, I see the instructions to set 777 under storage to remove file_put_contents: failed to open stream error. So i setup permission 777 to storage chmod -R 777 storage But the error was not fixed. here, you should consider one: who writes files to storage/ sessions and views. That is not ec2-user, but apache. Yes, right. "apache" user writes file (session file, compiled view file) to the session and view folder. So you should give apache to write permission to these folder. By default: SELinux say the /var/www folder should be read-only by the apache deamon.

So for this, we can set the selinux as 0: setenforce 0

This can solve problem temporally, but this makes the mysql not working. so this is not so good solution.

You can set a read-write context to the storage folder with: (remember to setenforce 1 to test it out)

chcon -Rt httpd_sys_content_rw_t storage/

Then your problem will be fixed.

3. and don't forget this composer update php artisan cache:clear

   These commands will be useful after or before.

   I hope you save your time. Good luck. Hacken

Change the permissions for your project folder to enable read/write/exec for any user within the group owning the directory (which in your case is _www):

chmod -R 775 /path/to/your/project

Then add your OS X username to the _www group to allow it access to the directory:

sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a yourusername -t user _www

We've run into many edge cases when setting up permissions for Laravel applications. We create a separate user account (deploy) for owning the Laravel application folder and executing Laravel commands from the CLI, and run the web server under www-data. One issue this causes is that the log file(s) may be owned by www-data or deploy, depending on who wrote to the log file first, obviously preventing the other user from writing to it in the future.

I've found that the only sane and secure solution is to use Linux ACLs. The goal of this solution is:

1. To allow the user who owns/deploys the application read and write access to the Laravel application code (we use a user named deploy).
2. To allow the www-data user read access to Laravel application code, but not write access.
3. To prevent any other users from accessing the Laravel application code/data at all.
4. To allow both the www-data user and the application user (deploy) write access to the storage folder, regardless of which user owns the file (so both deploy and www-data can write to the same log file for example).

We accomplish this as follows:

1. All files within the application/ folder are created with the default umask of 0022, which results in folders having drwxr-xr-x permissions and files having -rw-r--r--.
2. sudo chown -R deploy:deploy application/ (or simply deploy your application as the deploy user, which is what we do).
3. chgrp www-data application/ to give the www-data group access to the application.
4. chmod 750 application/ to allow the deploy user read/write, the www-data user read-only, and to remove all permissions to any other users.
5. setfacl -Rdm u:www-data:rwx,u:deploy:rwx application/storage/ to set the default permissions on the storage/ folder and all subfolders. Any new folders/files created in the storage folder will inherit these permissions (rwx for both www-data and deploy).
6. setfacl -Rm u:www-data:rwX,u:deploy:rwX application/storage/ to set the above permissions on any existing files/folders.

I'd do it like this:

sudo chown -R $USER:www-data laravel-project/ 

find laravel-project/ -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

find laravel-project/ -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

then finally, you need to give webserver permission to modify the storage and bootstrap/cache directories:

sudo chgrp -R www-data storage bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx storage bootstrap/cache

The Laravel 5.4 docs say:

After installing Laravel, you may need to configure some permissions. Directories within the storage and the bootstrap/cache directories should be writable by your web server or Laravel will not run. If you are using the Homestead virtual machine, these permissions should already be set.

There are a lot of answers on this page that mention using 777 permissions. Don't do that. You'd be exposing yourself to hackers.

Instead, follow the suggestions by others about how to set permissions of 755 (or more restrictive). You may need to figure out which user your app is running as by running whoami in the terminal and then change ownership of certain directories using chown -R.

If you do not have permission to use sudo as so many other answers require...

Your server is probably a shared host such as Cloudways.

(In my case, I had cloned my Laravel application into a second Cloudways server of mine, and it wasn't completely working because the permissions of the storage and bootstrap/cache directories were messed up.)

I needed to use:

Cloudways Platform > Server > Application Settings > Reset Permission

Then I could run php artisan cache:clear in the terminal.

The permissions for the storage and vendor folders should stay at 775, for obvious security reasons.

However, both your computer and your server Apache need to be able to write in these folders. Ex: when you run commands like php artisan, your computer needs to write in the logs file in storage.

All you need to do is to give ownership of the folders to Apache :

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/vendor
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/storage

Then you need to add your computer (referenced by it's username) to the group to which the server Apache belongs. Like so :

sudo usermod -a -G www-data userName

NOTE: Most frequently, groupName is www-data but in your case, replace it with _www

First of your answer is.

sudo chmod -R 777/775 /path/project_folder

Now You need to understand permissions and options in ubuntu.

• chmod - You can set permissions.
• chown - You can set the ownership of files and directories.
• 777 - read/write/execute.
• 775 - read/execute.

As posted already

All you need to do is to give ownership of the folders to Apache :

but I added -R for chown command: sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/vendor sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/project/storage