For a typical Ubuntu server running Nginx or Apache with PHP-FPM:
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data storage
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data bootstrap/cache
sudo chmod -R 775 storage
sudo chmod -R 775 bootstrap/cache
Here:
$USERis the Linux user currently logged in.www-datais commonly the user/group used by the web server on Ubuntu.775gives the owner and group read, write, and execute permissions.- Other users receive read and execute permissions only.
Laravel needs write access to these directories for logs, cache, compiled views, sessions, and other generated files.
If Laravel still reports permission errors, confirm which user PHP is running as before changing permissions further.
ps aux | grep php
For Nginx, the configured worker user can also be checked with:
grep "^user" /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
The goal is to give Laravel the permissions it actually needs rather than solving permission problems by making directories globally writable.