Deploying a Laravel vapor project with vapor-ui causes every request to the service to respond with a 502

The problem: Whenever I try to make a request to a Laravel API hosted with Laravel Vapor, I get a 502. When I view error logs in Cloudwatch, I see this:

As you can see here, the 502 is being returned because there seems either to be a permissions problem with the bootstrap/cache folder or the folder is not present for some reason after deployment.

What I did to try to fix this:

• I ensured the folder permissions were correct (the cache folder has 755, and the .gitignore 644).
• As you can see I ensured there was a .gitignore ignoring the entire contents of the cache folder.
• I tried to dump-autoload and composer update.
• I tried deploying from the command line and from git actions

All of the above did not yield any results and the support team tried their best but also could not identify the issue.

The solution?? So, one of my teammates noticed that we only started experiencing this issue after adding the vapor-ui package. I removed it completely from our projects, redeployed, and no more error. The API responds as expected now.

My question is, why would installing vapor-ui cause this issue? I know that the vapor-ui project itself is a Laravel project so could it be that there is no bootstrap/cache folder in the vapor-ui project?

Here are snippets of my vapor.yml file before removing the vapor-ui:

id: 1234
name: notreal
environments:
  production:
    domain: notreal.notreal.com
    memory: 1024
    cli-memory: 512
    runtime: docker
    network: vapor-network-123
    build:
      - 'composer install --no-dev'
      - 'php artisan vapor-ui:install'
      - 'npm ci && npm run prod && rm -rf node_modules'
  staging:
    domain: sta-notreal.notreal.com
    memory: 1024
    cli-memory: 512
    runtime: docker
    network: vapor-network-1647335449
    database: notreal-sta
    build:
      - 'composer install'
      - 'php artisan vapor-ui:install'
      - 'npm ci && npm run dev && rm -rf node_modules'
  development:
    domain: dev-notreal.notreal.com
    memory: 1024
    cli-memory: 512
    runtime: docker
    network: vapor-network-123
    database: notreal-dev
    build:
      - 'composer install'
      - 'php artisan vapor-ui:install'
      - 'npm ci && npm run prod && rm -rf node_modules'

I don't think you need this build step: php artisan vapor-ui:install

You do it locally and then everything is in place already when you deploy