There are two directories within a Laravel application that need to be writable by the server: storage and bootstrap/cache. Within these directories, the server will write application-specific files such as cache info, session data, error logs, etc.
To allow this to happen, you need to update the permissions of storage and bootstrap/cache so they are owned by the system user your web server is running as.
To identify this system user, run the following command to output processes on your system related to your web server (either Apache or Nginx):
> ps aux | egrep '(apache|httpd|nginx)'
From this output, identify the user from the leftmost column. Ignore any processes owned by root.
On Nginx, you’re looking for the nginx: worker process process, so from the following example output we see the user is www-data:
root 2724 0.0 0.2 81896 2108 ? Ss Jun23 0:00 nginx: master process /usr/sbin/nginx -g daemon on; master_process on;
www-data 2726 0.0 0.4 82640 4504 ? S Jun23 0:00 nginx: worker process
root 60668 0.0 0.2 7008 2136 pts/0 S+ 14:50 0:00 grep -E --color=auto (apache|httpd|nginx)
Here’s an example from an Apache server where we also see the user www-data:
root 11929 0.0 1.2 238908 12180 ? Ss Jun24 0:10 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 71685 0.0 0.9 239664 9304 ? S 00:00 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 71686 0.0 0.9 239664 9292 ? S 00:00 0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root 78734 0.0 0.2 8160 2376 pts/0 S+ 14:50 0:00 grep -E --color=auto (apache|httpd|nginx)
Knowing this, I will update storage and bootstrap/cache to be owned by www-data with the following two chown (change owner) commands:
> chown -R www-data storage
> chown -R www-data bootstrap/cache
You should now be able to load your application without any permission errors. If your application isn’t working, check out my guide Common Laravel Installation Issues.