Permission Denied Error using Laravel & Docker

I found similar problem and I fixed it by

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

chmod -R 755 /var/www/storage

Make your Dockerfile something as below -

FROM php:7-fpm
WORKDIR /var/www
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y libmcrypt-dev mysql-client && docker-php-ext-install mcrypt pdo_mysql
ADD . /var/www
RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

This makes directory /var/www owned by www-data which is the default user for php-fpm.

Since it is compiled with user www-data.

Ref-

https://github.com/docker-library/php/blob/57b41cfc2d1e07acab2e60d59a0cb19d83056fc1/7.0/jessie/fpm/Dockerfile


When using bind mounts in Docker, the original permissions in the Docker host are preserved in the container. This enables us to set appropriate permissions on the Docker host, to be used inside the container.

First, you should find the uid and gid of the nginx, for example:

docker-compose exec nginx id www-data

The output of this command would be something like this:

uid=33(www-data) gid=33(www-data) groups=33(www-data)

Then, you should use these uid and gid to set permissions on Docker host, which will be used by the container too. So, run the following command on the Docker host:

sudo chown -R 33:33 site

Now everything must be working.


You can do 3 things as I used/using

  1. Grant 755 permission to storage folder (sudo chmod 755 storage/ storage/* )

  2. RUN chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www RUN chmod 755 /var/www

  3. Move project folder to /home which is no need of special permission to write on that directory(Personally Recommend this) (In mine I have used /home/projects/ and all of them placed there).


Note: If the project is in /var/www/ then if you wrote file upload also you need permission to that folders too. this will avoid such error when you moved that to /home