Symbolic link from storage to public not working

Does your webserver follow symlinks? In Apache you have to set Options +FollowSymLinks for the directories concerned. Just a guess! :-)

Does your webserver follow symlinks? In Apache you have to set Options FollowSymLinks for the directories concerned. Just a guess! :-)

I'm using MAMP, not sure if it has that option on or off by default.

I tried adding Options FollowSymLinks to the .htaccess in the /public directory, but I'm still getting 403. I created another .htaccess in the root of the Laravel project, same thing, and another one in the /storage directory, but it still didn't work.

Do I need to change the Apache config directly?

@ohffs

It should be +FollowSymLinks (sorry - did an edit to my original answer). The option has to be inside a block as far as I remember - so something like :

.... various options ...
<Directory /var/www/html/project/public>
 Options +FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

That's just off the top of my head though! You might want to look in your apache error_log file too - it might give you another pointer :-)

I checked http.conf and it looks like symlinks are allowed :

<Directory />
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>

I also looked at the Apache logs and saw this :

Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/mods, referer: http://localhost:8888/Mods/public/

@ohffs I tried Options +FollowSymLinks as well but still no luck. :(

When I try to place it in a block in the .htaccess I get a 500 error though, and this in the log :

    /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/.htaccess: <Directory not allowed here

Just to check - if you do an ls -l /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/mods does it work ok?

@ohffs It prints this in the terminal :

lrwxr-xr-x  1 charles  staff  12  5 Dec 11:27 /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/mods -> storage/mods

But it still doesn't work.

Thanks a lot for helping though!

Can you try rm'ing the current symlink and doing ln -s /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/mods/ /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/mods - just to check the symlink is right? I'm not on a Mac just now so not 100% sure, but the ls output doesn't look quite right :-)

Edit: I'm about to head off for dinner - if that doesn't fix it hopefully someone else will chip in :-)

@ohffs Removing it and remaking it did the trick! Last time I didn't use the complete path, only the storage/mods and public/mods parts.

I had to use this command though :

ln -s /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/storage/mods/ /Users/charles/Documents/Web/Mods/public/mods

(I suspect this is just a typo on your part)

Thanks for the help, it's really appreciated. :)

No worries - glad it fixed things. You don't really need the full path - the problem was just that you need the trailing '/' on the first argument with to make things happy on BSD-ish systems - on Linux/GNU I think it works either way. So you should be able to do (from your Mods directory) ln -s storage/mods/ public/mods for instance :-) Anyway - glad it's workng! :-)

The problem for me was that I had my symlink created in my Mac local environment instead of inside vagrant. I entered my vm through vagrant ssh and then manually created my symlink with ln -s "/home/vagrant/Code/project01/storage/app/public" storage within my public directory or you can just run php artisan storage:link.

@rui.melo Thank you! This did the trick