Introduction

After a long, frustrating debugging exercise, I have discovered a quick tip for my Cloudways + Laravel friends. The “why” is still a touch fuzzy for me at the moment, but I’ll at least explain the symptoms and the fix.

The goal: Add a private file upload to a Filament resource form, ensuring anonymous users cannot download/view the file.

The issue: Everything was working great in my ddev environment. I could preview and open the files if I was logged in, and I would see a 403 if I was logged out. When I moved this to a Cloudways server I was getting automatically logged-out every time I hit a private file URL. Weird, right?

Code

Here’s the final code (the Cloudways “fix” is further down this page):