Laravel Nova Shows 403 Error Before Login in Production

When no user is authenticated the Nova gate is being evaluated with a null value. In production (especially when route or config caching is enabled) Laravel’s Nova middleware checks the gate almost immediately. If your gate doesn’t account for guests, even a gate that “always returns true” may trigger an authorization error because it’s expecting a valid user before showing Nova.

One solution is to update your gate so that it properly distinguishes between unauthenticated users and authenticated ones. For example, you can modify your definition to only return true when a valid (authenticated) user exists:

PHPCopied
protected function gate()
{
    Gate::define('viewNova', function ($user = null) {
        // If there's no user, return false so that Nova redirects to the login
        return $user !== null;
    });
}

With this change, if no user is logged in, the authorization will fail and Nova’s authentication middleware will kick in to redirect the user (instead of returning a 403 response outright). Also, make sure that your authentication guard configuration is the same in production and that you clear the cached config/routes if needed (for example, with php artisan config:clear and php artisan route:clear).