When this package started, it started as a listener for log events and would only work with another channel. This package would listen to log events and just add extra log to cloud watch. So, you did not need to add cloudwatch as a channel. But after 1.0 it works as a custom driver. So, you MUST add LOG_CHANNEL as cloudwatch in your logging config for this to work going forward.

composer require pagevamp/laravel-cloudwatch-logs

You can use laravel's default \Log class to use this

\Log::info('user logged in', ['id' => 123, 'name' => 'Naren']);

Make sure the AWS Lambda template contains an IAM role with enough access. So think about Logs:CreateLogGroup, Logs:DescribeLogGroups, Logs:CreateLogStream, Logs:DescribeLogStream, Logs:PutRetentionPolicy and Logs:PutLogEvents

Config for logging is defined at config/logging.php. Add cloudwatch to the channels array

'channels' => [
 'cloudwatch' => [
 'driver' => 'custom',
 'name' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_NAME', ''),
 'region' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_REGION', ''),
 'credentials' => [
 'key' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_KEY', ''),
 'secret' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_SECRET', '')
 ],
 'stream_name' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_STREAM_NAME', 'laravel_app'),
 'retention' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_RETENTION_DAYS', 14),
 'group_name' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_GROUP_NAME', 'laravel_app'),
 'version' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_VERSION', 'latest'),
 'formatter' => \Monolog\Formatter\JsonFormatter::class, 
 'batch_size' => env('CLOUDWATCH_LOG_BATCH_SIZE', 10000), 
 'via' => \Pagevamp\Logger::class,
 ],
]

And set the LOG_CHANNEL in your environment variable to cloudwatch.

If the role of your AWS EC2 instance has access to Cloudwatch logs, CLOUDWATCH_LOG_KEY and CLOUDWATCH_LOG_SECRET need not be defined in your .env file.

I have added a pre-commit hook to run php-cs-fixer whenever you make a commit. To enable this run sh hooks.sh.