chmod -R 777 storage worked for me

Lol, This is the most popular page of all BookStack GitHub pages.

Hello fellow Laravel developers who have googled their writable storage issues. It’s important to be aware of what permissions you are setting so I thought I’d provide a little overview. Better, more detailed guides are available via more googling.

Unix-Style Permissions

Files and folders have 3 main permissions: read, write & execute. Files and folders are also assigned an owner and group.

Reading Permissions

You can run ls -alh in the terminal to show the files and folders with their permissions:

# ls -alh
drwxrwxr-x  5 dan      dan 4.0K May 28 13:58 .
drwxrwxr-x 18 dan      dan 4.0K Jun  9 10:38 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 dan      dan 5.6K Dec 10 18:19 book_default_cover.png
drwxr-xr-x  2 dan      dan 4.0K Jun  9 10:40 dist
-rw-rwxr--  1 www-data dan  11K Oct 26  2016 favicon.ico
-rw-r--r--  1 dan      dan  412 Aug  9  2017 .htaccess

The permissions are on the left, in the first column. The starting d is shown if it’s a directory. Then there are three sets of rwx.

• The first set of rwx is the permissions for the owner.
• The second set of rwx is the permissions for the group.
• The third set of rwx is the permissions for everyone else.

Each of these characters represents read, write or execute. A hyphen (-) is shown instead if the permission is not granted. Note that execute permissions are required on folders to enter them.

The owner assigned to a file/folder can be seen in the third column. The group can be seen in the fourth. In the example above the file favicon.ico is assigned to the group dan and is owned by www-data. The owner www-data has permission to read and write the file. The group dan has permission to read, write, or execute the file. Everyone else can only read the file.

Octal Format

Permissions may also be shown as numbers in an octal format. In the octal format each permission has a number:

• Read = 4
• Write = 2
• Execute = 1
• No permission = 0

These numbers are summed together into a single digit. For example, Having all permissions will be shown as a 7 or only having Read+Execute permissions will be shown as a 5. These totals are often used in a set of 3 to represent the permissions for the group, owner & everyone else.

In the example command output above, the permissions for favicon.ico could be shown as 674. The .htaccess file permissions could be shown as 644. All permissions granted to everyone would show as 777.

Setting Permissions

There are two main commands for controlling permissions:

• chmod (Change mode), Used to set permissions.
• chown (Change ownership), Used to change the owner and group.

For both of these commands using -R will set permissions recursively upon all child files and directories.

chmod usage

# Format:
chmod [OPTIONS] PERMISSONS FILES...

# Example:
# Grant the owner and group 'read+write+execute' permissions
# Give everyone else 'read and execute' permissions
# In the './storage' directory and all files+folders within.
chmod -R 775 ./storage 

chown usage

# Format:
chown [OPTIONS] USER:GROUP

# Example:
# In the './storage' directory and all files+folders within
# Set the owner to be 'dan' and set the group to be 'www-data'
chown -R dan:www-data ./storage 

Common use

For things such as file uploads, you’d generally want these to be both readable and writable by the webserver. The user and group your web server runs as will depend on your system and config. On ubuntu it’s common for apache and nginx to run as www-data, both as the owner and group. In this case, If i wanted to give the webserver permission to upload and serve files within the ./storage directory I might do the following:

# Recursively set myself as the owner and the web server as the assigned group
chown -R dan:www-data ./storage

# Recursively allow myself and the webserver to Read, Write and Execute files & folders
# While allowing everyone else to only Read or Execute
chmod -R 775 ./storage

---

Just to reiterate, There’s better and more in-depth guide elsewhere, Just have a google, but the above may help you understand what’s going on when you’re setting permission on your server.

Not sure what was going on - restarted httpd and that problem is solved.

This is with Apache on Centos 7.

I had previously done chmod 777 -R storage bootstrap/cache public/uploads but I might have made a typo.

Thanks for the quick reply and help.

Fixed my problem with this command in centos 7.6 Server

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t $SITE_PATH
 
chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t $SITE_PATH

I don’t remember ever seeing such a nice, concise yet in-depth overview of Unix permissions management on the net anywhere. Funny it’s hidden in an obscure post on the BookStack forum. Thanks 😃

@vikasrinvi That is a subtly different issue. This has been answered above already.

Another culprit behind this error could also be selinux.

See https://linuxhint.com/how-to-disable-selinux-on-centos-7/

@ssddanbrown as far as I know, you made two minor mistakes in your explanation. The first rwx is for the user and the second for the group. Same goes for the chown command (user:group instead of group:user which you correctly used in the last code block).

But basically UNIX permissions is a must for every web developer and one of the most common errors! There is no “golden rule” since there are too many possible scenarios (OS, setup, sticky bits, …). You need to know some facts about your hosting environment. Hosting panels will often handle user rights differently to basic manually installed webserver, some distributions use different service names (e.g. in CentOS there is no www-data user, apache is used instead, but the service is not called apache, it’s httpd there). The better you know your hosting environment, the easier it is for you to track down issues (or for us to help).

Setting wrong permissions (and 777 is a wrong permission in most cases) leads to lowered security. In some cases this might lead to full disclosure of sensitive data (Log may contain mysql user and password if the mysql server is not accessible for a short time and with 777 be exposed to the web, luckily Laravel does not write user and password to the log).

An easy way to find out what user is delivering your site to the browser is to place a simple php file in your webroot and use it to create a file like:

<?php
touch('/tmp/permissionstestfile'); #replace tmp with a directory you know everybody has write access if using tmp is not possible

After calling it once in your browser, with ls -l /tmp you will see user and group the webserver needs for reading/writing files.