For Laravel applications deployed on a web server, the index.php file inside the public directory needs to have specific permissions to ensure the application runs smoothly and securely. Here are the recommended permissions for the index.php file and the public directory:

Permissions for index.php File

Owner:

The owner should be the user under which your web server (Apache or Nginx) runs. On Ubuntu systems with Apache, this user is typically www-data. For Nginx, it's also www-data.

Permissions:

The recommended permissions for index.php are 644.

This means read and write permissions for the owner (6), and read-only permissions for group and others (4).

Permissions for public Directory

Owner:

The owner should be set to the user under which your web server runs (www-data for Apache or Nginx).

Permissions:

The recommended permissions for the public directory are 755.

This means read, write, and execute permissions for the owner (7), and read and execute permissions for group and others (5).

Setting Permissions

You can set the correct permissions using the following commands. These assume you are logged in via SSH to your EC2 instance and have navigated to your Laravel project directory (/var/www/html/your-laravel-project):

# Navigate to your Laravel project directory

cd /var/www/html/your-laravel-project

# Set the owner of the public directory and index.php to www-data

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data public/index.php

# Set permissions for the public directory and index.php

sudo chmod 755 public

sudo chmod 644 public/index.php

Verification

To verify that the permissions and ownership are set correctly, you can use the following commands:

# Check ownership of index.php

ls -l public/index.php

# Check ownership and permissions of the public directory

ls -ld public

The output should show something similar to:

-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 3482 Jul  1 10:00 public/index.php

drwxr-xr-x 3 www-data www-data 4096 Jul  1 09:59 public