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

I need to make more adjustments for SELinux than just for storage. Especially the config dir can get you this issue on Laravel bootstrapping.

If you sudo setenforce permissive and it works, then turn it back sudo setenforce enforcing then follow below.

SELinux laravel setup: sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/var/www/site/laravel/storage(/.*)?" sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/var/www/site/laravel/bootstrap/cache(/.*)?" sudo semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/var/www/site/laravel/config(/.*)?" restorecon -Rv /var/www/site/

Answer 2

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!