The "Permission denied" error indicates that the current user does not have the required permissions to access or modify the public folder. To resolve this, you need to adjust the permissions and ownership of the public directory and its contents.

Here's a step-by-step guide to fix this:

Step-by-Step Guide

Connect to Your EC2 Instance via SSH

Connect to your EC2 instance using SSH. Replace /path/to/your-key.pem with the path to your SSH key, and your-ec2-instance-public-dns with the public DNS of your EC2 instance.

ssh -i /path/to/your-key.pem ubuntu@your-ec2-instance-public-dns

Set Correct Ownership

Ensure that the public directory is owned by the web server user (www-data for Apache on Ubuntu).

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/your-laravel-project/public

Set Correct Permissions

Adjust the permissions to allow the web server to read and execute files in the public directory.

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/your-laravel-project/public

Example Commands to Execute

# Connect to your EC2 instance

ssh -i /path/to/your-key.pem ubuntu@your-ec2-instance-public-dns

# Navigate to your project directory

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

# Set correct ownership to www-data

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data public

# Set permissions to 755

sudo chmod -R 755 public

Verify Permissions

To verify the permissions, you can use the ls -ld command:

ls -ld /var/www/html/your-laravel-project/public

The output should look something like this:

drwxr-xr-x 10 www-data www-data 4096 Jun  7 10:00 public

This indicates that the public directory has the correct permissions and is owned by www-data.