Permissions Issue with Laravel on CentOS

Question

I've cloned a laravel repo to my CentOS 7 box. When I try to run it, I get a 500 error with nothing displayed.

So I check out /var/log/httpd/error_log and I see that I've got some permissions errors:

[Mon May 16 11:39:32.996441 2016] [:error] [pid 2434] [client 104.156.67.195:39136] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught UnexpectedValueException: The stream or file "/var/www/html/MYSITE/storage/logs/laravel.log" could not be opened: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php:13701
Stack trace:
#0 /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php(13635): Monolog\\Handler\\StreamHandler->write(Array)
#1 /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php(13396): Monolog\\Handler\\AbstractProcessingHandler->handle(Array)
#2 /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php(13494): Monolog\\Logger->addRecord(400, Object(Symfony\\Component\\Debug\\Exception\\FatalErrorException), Array)
#3 /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php(13189): Monolog\\Logger->error(Object(Symfony\\Component\\Debug\\Exception\\FatalErrorException), Array)
#4 /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php(13160): Illuminate\\Log\\Writer->writeLog('error', Object(Symfony\\Component\\Debug\\Exception\\FatalErrorException), Array)
# in /var/www/html/MYSITE/bootstrap/cache/compiled.php on line 13701

I have done the following to try to overcome the issues:

chmod -R 775 storage
chmod -R 775 vendor
chown -R apache:apache storage

So it now shows as so:

-rwxrwxr-x. 1 apache apache 2156 May 16 11:41 storage/logs/laravel.log

But that didn't work.

Interestingly enough, I mis-typed some artisan commands earlier and those seemed to add logs to the logfile...

I already read/tried:

• “laravel.log” could not be opened: failed to open stream
• Error: laravel.log could not be opened
• log file permission problem

Answer 1

Turns out the issue is with selinux

I found this answer, which solved my problem.

Prove this is the problem by turning off selinux with the command

setenforce 0

This should allow writing, but you've turned off added security server-wide. That's bad. Turn SELinux back

setenforce 1

Then finally use SELinux to allow writing of the file by using this command

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t storage

And you're off!