"storage/logs/laravel-2019-11-22.log" could not be opened: failed to open stream: Permission denied

Question

I got the following error when entering my site on a production server:

The stream or file "/var/app/current/storage/logs/laravel-2019-11-22.log" could not be opened: failed to open stream: Permission denied

I tried running the following commands and got Permisions denied in the terminal:

php artisan cache:clear
php artisan config:clear
php artisan config:cache
php artisan optimize:clear

I ran chmod -R 775 storage/logs/ and composer dump-autoload and I was able to get onto the home page of my site without any errors. After surfing around the site a bit more I was getting the same error in various areas and not in others:

Again same error

The stream or file "/var/app/current/storage/logs/laravel-2019-11-22.log" could not be opened: failed to open stream: Permission denied

I deleted the following files and ran php artisan cahce:clear:

/bootstrap/cache/packages.php
/bootstrap/cache/services.php
/bootstrap/cache/config.php.php

The only other advice I've seen is run:

sudo chmod -R 777 storage/*

Which seems like a bad idea on a production server, but seems to be upvoted answer. Should I just give my storage director 777 permissions and why? Is there another way of fixing this?

Edit:

I'm trying to do this as stated here:

// set current user as owner and the webserver user as the group
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data storage
sudo chown -R $USER:www-data bootstrap/cache
// set directory permission to be 775
chmod -R 775 storage
chmod -R 775 bootstrap/cache

but when I run sudo chown -R $USER:www-data storage I get this error:

chown: invalid group: ‘myusername:www-data’

Answer 1

Alright I got the answer:

AWS AMI uses webapp as the web user, not apache or ec2-user as the file shows. In that case, the webapp user has no access rights over those files.

sudo chown $USER:webapp ./storage -R

find ./storage -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;

find ./storage -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

Answer 2

Using the console, go to your synced folder (vagrant)

sudo chown -R $USER:www-data storage
chmod -R 775 storage