Perfect Laravel 5 Files, Folders Permission and Ownership Setup

Introduction:

In this tutorial I will give you details on how you should deal with Laravel 5 files and folders permission and ownership while working on Laravel 5 project.

In current area of development security is most valuable part for the application, as a developer you should be very careful while uploading projects on server for the production.

Folder permissions is the key point for the security if you loss this key your application will be giving an invitation to the hacker, in simple words it’s open to the word if you haven’t set a proper permissions for your application hacker can easily stole or hack your product.

Second thing if you are in beginner or intermediate phase of the Laravel Development then this tutorial is going to help you a lot.

I see we use to make mistakes while going through this phase but no worries this tutorial is going to help you to be safe from application.

Want to use AngularJS in Laravel 5 – Laravel 5 Angular JS File Upload

Security Issue:

I often see people used to upload Laravel project on server and the first error they use get is the lack of file & folder permissions, and then they used to take quick action by setting files and folder permission to their folder to 777 and project started running.

However if you notice this is really a bad practice if you do this meaning if you set 777 permission to your project directory that say your server is open to the world.

Meaning anyone that can visit to you application can have read, write and execute permission on your server.

In Simple words – anyone can read the data from your application, write the data and execute the files, so hackers can easily upload file or virus or malware and execute to damage your project.

Wondering how your one wrong step impacts to the security of your application right?

`Always Avoid Setting 777 Permission to your Project`

Let’s fix this issue in the next step:

Set Laravel 5 Files Folders Permission and Ownership:

First step you need take is find the web server user and that is very simple, for apache it is set to www-data, but do make sure by using following command, go ahead and ssh to your server by using terminal and run below command:

ps aux | egrep '(apache|httpd)'

You should get output similar to this:

www-data 19484  0.0  6.1 432140 62892 ?        S    07:44   0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 19552  0.0  4.5 347716 45808 ?        S    07:50   0:01 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 19553  0.0  6.0 426104 61328 ?        S    07:50   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 19566  0.0  5.6 426876 57764 ?        S    07:50   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 19570  0.0  5.6 426312 57160 ?        S    07:50   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 19759  0.0  5.2 426332 53328 ?        S    07:59   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 19760  0.0  4.5 349176 46152 ?        S    07:59   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data 20008  0.0  0.8 342060  8912 ?        S    08:07   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
root     20120  0.0  0.0  14992   976 pts/0    S+   08:08   0:00 grep -E --color=auto (apache|httpd)

This output clearly saying that apache is running by `www-data`, so we get our user.

change the directory/project-directory owner to `www-data`, use following command:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/path/your/project/

Example: (replace example-project-name to your project directory name)

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/example-project-name/

Set Folders permissions to 755 and file of your project to 644:

Folder/Directory Permissions:

sudo find /var/www/example-project-name/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

Files Permissions:

sudo find /var/www/example-project-name/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

By setting this permissions and ownership we are saying to server that web server owns this files and folders and end user access is limited to only read, so now user won’t be able to write or execute any file on the server.

Now we are set and secure, but how about Laravel project if you still run your project it will give same issue, because Laravel still needs read and write access to the `storeate` and `bootstrap/cache` folder, let’s fix this.

we can fix this by giving read and write access to web server:

sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/example-project-name/storage /var/www/example-project-name/bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx /var/www/example-project-name/storage /var/www/example-project-name/bootstrap/cache

Keep in mind to assign this access to all your further folder as per your project requirements, for example you must be having a directory where you upload images or documents.

You are all good to run your project on server and if you try to run you Laravel project it should work.

Hang on you still need a little last step to follow, for sure you need to upload file from FTP or so. right ?

SFTP/FTP Upload Files Permissions:

This step is only for those having there project under development and who wants to keep uploading files using SFTP or FTP, so basically you need to own files and folders from the project so that you can have rights to modify and also keep in mind you means the user your are going to use for login e.g. root or ubuntu.

Simply add your user to the group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data root

In the above step root can be replace by your username from the server it may be `ubuntu` if your working on AWS EC2 instance.

Next use following command to change ownership:

sudo chown -R root:www-data /var/www/example-project-name/

And finally assign files and folder permissions:

sudo find /var/www/example-project-name/ -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;    
sudo find /var/www/example-project-name/ -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

Now you all set and secure to go with your Laravel site and it is going to be easy for you to play with files and folders.

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