Laravel returning server error 500 on CentOS 7

As the title says, I have a VPS running on CentOS 7, I installed all the requisites for Laravel, PHP 7.3, but it still giving me ‘Server Error 500’.

Note that this is a fresh installation of Laravel with composer.

• My CentOS version is CentOS Linux release 7.2.1511 (Core)
• PHP version is PHP 7.3.6 (cli)
• I manually installed all the necessary modules from PHP

What I have already tried

I already did quite a lot of research:

Laravel giving 500 internal error on centos 7 with apache and php 7
I followed what the answer to that questions says and still the same for me.

I did also set up permissions correctly following this other post:
How to set up File Permissions for Laravel 5 (and others)

Also these ones
Getting a 500 Internal Server Error on Laravel 5+ Ubuntu 14.04

https://www.ionos.com/community/server-cloud-infrastructure/apache/how-to-fix-http-error-code-500-internal-server-error/

And a bunch of more articles I read on another websites.

These are the permissions for the project folder:
drwxr-xr-x 13 apache apache 4096 May 31 05:23 laravel

And for storage:
drwxr-xr-x 5 apache apache 4096 May 31 04:44 storage

Tried generating the key and got this:

[root@server laravel]# php artisan key:generate

   ErrorException  : file_get_contents(/var/www/laravel/.env): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

  at /var/www/laravel/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Console/KeyGenerateCommand.php:96
     92|     {
     93|         file_put_contents($this->laravel->environmentFilePath(), preg_replace(
     94|             $this->keyReplacementPattern(),
     95|             'APP_KEY='.$key,
  >  96|             file_get_contents($this->laravel->environmentFilePath())
     97|         ));
     98|     }
     99|
    100|     /**

  Exception trace:

  1   file_get_contents("/var/www/laravel/.env")
      /var/www/laravel/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Console/KeyGenerateCommand.php:96

  2   IlluminateFoundationConsoleKeyGenerateCommand::writeNewEnvironmentFileWith("base64:soTdeaCmsY1ELnpJLCcYkBJjY6SWiLYwY+Mvoxl9wOw=")
      /var/www/laravel/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Console/KeyGenerateCommand.php:80

  Please use the argument -v to see more details.
[root@server laravel]#