Writing Log File Error file_put_contents(/var/www/html/myproject/ulogs/my-log.log): Failed to open stream: Permission denied – Apache

I have inherited a PHP application and need to investigate various issues. I am not a PHP programmer so bear with me.

I wrote a function to log messages to a custom log file.

<?php
function my_logger($log_msg)
{
error_log("USER INFO:::::",0);
error_log(get_current_user());
error_log(exec('whoami'));
    file_put_contents('/var/www/html/myproject/ulogs/my-log.log', date('G:i:s') . ">>$ " . $log_msg . "n", FILE_APPEND);

}

After a lot of 500 errors and no information I discovered that the following line is being written to the error_log.log

PHP Warning:
file_put_contents(/var/www/html/myproject/ulogs/my-log.log): Failed to
open stream: Permission denied in
/var/www/html/myproject/app/lib/log_fns.php on line 11

I have put in a call to get_current_user and whoami which shows me:

[07-Apr-2021 14:26:04 UTC] USER INFO::::
[07-Apr-2021 14:26:04 UTC] root 
[07-Apr-2021 14:26:04 UTC] apache

I am calling this at the moment from a simple php page called at http:///test_log.php:

<?php

require("/var/www/html/myproject/app/lib/log_fns.php");

//phpinfo();

my_logger("This is a test message from test_log.php");

?>

I tried to chmod the files to 777 in the ./lib directory but was still getting this error. I have hard coded the path you can see above creating the ulogs directory.

I have tried combinations of chmod the ulogs directory to 777 and chown the directory to apache:apache but still get this error.

Any ideas where I can look next or how to solve?

TIA