500 Internal Server Error in Laravel

1. About error 500
2. Where to look first
3. Common causes
4. Solution
5. Temporarily see the real error
6. Clear stale caches
7. Re-cache for production

#About error 500

A 500 Internal Server Error means the server hit an unhandled error while processing the request. It's deliberately generic: in production Laravel hides the details so it doesn't leak sensitive information to visitors. The actual cause is always written somewhere you can read.

#Where to look first

Don't guess, read the log. For Laravel:

tail -n 100 storage/logs/laravel.log

If nothing's there, the error happened before Laravel booted, so check the web server and PHP-FPM logs:

tail -n 100 /var/log/nginx/error.log
tail -n 100 /var/log/php8.3-fpm.log

See logging in Laravel for configuring where these go.

#Common causes

• Missing APP_KEY, see No application encryption key has been specified.
• File permissions on storage or bootstrap/cache, see failed to open stream: Permission denied.
• A stale cached config referencing values that no longer exist.
• A missing .env or wrong database credentials.
• A PHP error, out of memory, or a fatal syntax error in deployed code.

#Solution

#Temporarily see the real error

On a staging or local environment, enable debug mode to render the actual exception instead of the generic page:

APP_DEBUG=true

Never leave APP_DEBUG=true on in production, it exposes stack traces, environment values and database details to the public. Turn it back off the moment you've found the cause.

#Clear stale caches

A frequent cause right after deploy is a cached config or view pointing at something stale:

php artisan optimize:clear

This clears the config, route, view and event caches in one go, see clearing the cache in Laravel.

#Re-cache for production

Once it works, rebuild the caches for performance:

php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache