Here is the thing. I have a file in my Apache WebServer that does the following check:

if (!is_dir($pointer_location)){
   error_log("Config repo $pointer_location either does not exist or is not a directory");
   return;
}

When I go theck the error log I see the corresponding message:

Config repo /home/ec2-user/path/to/config/dir either does not exist or is not a directory

However when I do

ls -la /home/ec2-user/path/to/config/dir

I get the following output:

drwxrwxr-x 2 ec2-user apache     44 jul  5 10:41 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 ec2-user ec2-user 4096 jul  5 14:29 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user apache    816 jul  5 13:46 file1.cnf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ec2-user apache    994 jul  5 10:50 file2.cnf

Which tells the that the execution level permissions are there even for other users. So how come is_dir is returning false?