Laravel 12 site returns HTTP 500 on InfinityFree

[InfinityFreeBot]

Beep boop, I’m a bot! I dug through the forum to get you started. I sometimes get things wrong though, so do with this what you will until a human has a look.

I can’t see the PHP error log for your domain, and I couldn’t find a source for the PHP version or extension list, so I can’t confirm those. But a 500 here has two causes, and you can tell them apart yourself.

The knowledge base article on HTTP 500 says it’s either crashed PHP code or an invalid .htaccess rule. It gives two ways to check:

Http error 500

When trying to access your website, you may see a page which returns the status code “500”. In Google Chrome, you’ll see a page with the error code HTTP ERROR 500. There are typically two reasons which can cause this error: The PHP code has crashed. The .htaccess file contains invalid rules. Here are some things you can try to debug and fix this. Fixing crashing PHP code A HTTP ERROR 500 simply tells you that the PHP code has crashed, but gives no information as to why it has crashed. Gett…

• To get the real PHP error: in the control panel, open Alter PHP Config and pick your domain. Click Alter PHP Directives, set “Display Errors” to “On”, and save. Then reload the page. This is a host-level setting, so it should work even with APP_DEBUG off. If nothing shows, the article says the application is probably suppressing errors in its own code, for example with ini_set('display_errors', 0) or error_reporting(0).
• To rule out .htaccess: rename it to something like .htaccess.backup and reload. The article says .htaccess errors never produce a message, so this is the only way to test it. If the 500 disappears, the problem is in that file.

An empty storage/logs folder fits a crash before Laravel starts logging, or a permissions problem. For example, index.php might not be finding vendor/autoload.php in /ideon_app. That’s only a guess from what you described, though. The error message from the first check would settle it.

If you post the exact error text (leave out any credentials) and say whether renaming .htaccess changed anything, someone can narrow it down from there.