Laravel 5.2 could not open laravel.log

Question

I know there are a lot of questions on this topic but my issues is really weird that's why I decided to post. I have this error in /var/logs/apache/error.log

  [Tue Mar 01 07:26:51.435312 2016] [:error] [pid 8837] [client 127.0.0.1:37843] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'UnexpectedValueException' with message 'The stream or file "/var/www/personale/librarie-cor/storage/logs/laravel.log" could not be opened: 
failed to open stream: Permission denied' in /var/www/personale/librarie-cor/vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog/Handler/StreamHandler.php:87\nStack trace:
\n#0 /var/www/personale/librarie-cor/vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog/Handler/AbstractProcessingHandler.php(37): Monolog\\Handler\\StreamHandler->write(Array)
\n#1 /var/www/personale/librarie-cor/vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog/Logger.php(289): Monolog\\Handler\\AbstractProcessingHandler->handle(Array)
\n#2 /var/www/personale/librarie-cor/vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog/Logger.php(565): Monolog\\Logger->addRecord(400, Object(Symfony\\Component\\Debug\\Exception\\FatalErrorException), Array)
\n#3 /var/www/personale/librarie-cor/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Log/Writer.php(202): Monolog\\Logger->error(Object(Symfony\\Component\\Debug\\Exception\\FatalErrorException), Array)
\n#4 /var/www/personale/librarie-cor in /var/www/personale/librarie-cor/vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog/Handler/StreamHandler.php on line 87

The thing is I already did chmod -R 777 storage/, here is a screenshot:

How can I get rid of the error?

Answer 1

TLDR;

Run the following commands on your terminal

# Clear Laravel cache and the compiled classes
php artisan cache:clear
php artisan clear-compiled

# Change the storage and cache directories permission
sudo chmod -R 777 storage
sudo chmod -R 777 bootstrap/cache

# Regenerate the composer autoload file
composer dump-autoload

More thorough explanation

This usually happens because of the web server needs a write access to the storage and bootstrap/cache directories.

1. Check which user is being used by web server process

First, make sure that your webserver process is run by an account with limited privileges. Nginx and Apache usually will automatically create and use the less privileged www-data user and group. You can always use the ps command to check which user is being used by the running service:

ps aux | grep nginx

2. Set the owner of your project directory

Next, make sure that your Laravel project directory is owned by the same user and group who run the web server process. Suppose your web server is run by www-data and your project directory is located at /var/www/laravel, you can set the ownership like so:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/laravel

3. Give a write access to storage and cache directories

This is the IMPORTANT step, make sure you give the write permission both to storage and bootstrap/cache directories.

sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/laravel/storage
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/laravel/bootstrap/cache

Still Not Working?

If the above steps are still not working, you can try to run the following commands in the shell:

# 1. Clear Laravel cache
php artisan cache:clear

# 2. Delete the compiled class
php artisan clear-compiled

# 3. Regenerate the composer autoload file
composer dump-autoload

Yet, it still not working?

For the last resource, try to set the permission to 777 which means any users will have the ability to read and write to the given directories.

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/laravel/storage
sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/laravel/bootstrap/cache

Hope this help.

Answer 2

I had the same issue with Centos7 ... I tried EVERYTHING. Finally, I found a post on stackoverflow suggesting it could be selinux. I disabled selinux and it worked!