Can't get correct permissions for /var/www/html/

Question

I've read several threads here talking about this issue and tried all the solutions provided, none of them are working.

Whenever I try composer install I get a bunch of errors saying cannot install

[RuntimeException]                                                 
  /var/www/html/app/vendor does not exist and could not be created. 

Warning: The lock file is not up to date with the latest changes in composer.json. You may be getting outdated dependencies. Run update to update them.
  - Installing vlucas/phpdotenv (v2.2.0)
    Downloading: Failed       
    Downloading: Failed       
    Downloading: Failed       
    Failed to download vlucas/phpdotenv from dist: The "https://api.github.com/repos/vlucas/phpdotenv/zipball/9caf304153dc2288e4970caec6f1f3b3bc205412" file could not be downloaded: SSL operation failed with code 1. OpenSSL Error messages:
error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed
Failed to enable crypto
failed to open stream: operation failed
    Now trying to download from source

This is what I've tried so far:

sudo chmod -R g+rwX /var/www/html
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R g+rwX /var/www
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/html
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/html
sudo chmod g+s /var/www/html
sudo useradd -G www-data george
useradd: user 'george' already exists
sudo chown george /var/www/html/
sudo chown george /var/www/html/app/
sudo chmod g+s /var/www/html/app
sudo chmod 775 /var/www/html/app

Answer 1

Just run the following command: sudo chown -R $(whoami) /var/www/html

Answer 2

You can change ownership of the html directory like this:

sudo chown pi /var/www/html

Then set permissions to

chmod 776 -R /var/www/html

Which will allow read, write and execute permissions for User and Group and giving read and write permission to Other (www-data,apache, etc ...).