Moving Laravel outside of docroot gives me problems with php's chdir() and path('sys')

Question

I've been using Laravel 3 on a live website for a while, and decided to move the app to outside of docroot, delete the public_html folder, and symlink the public folder to the public_html one. I followed solution 1 here.

Having done that, my site has stopped loading, giving a 500 error. When I checked the error log in public/error_log, this message appears:

[05-Feb-2013 08:07:25] PHP Warning:  chdir() [<a href='function.chdir'>function.chdir</a>]: No such file or directory (errno 2) in /home4/indieweb/indiewebseries/paths.php on line 62
[05-Feb-2013 08:07:25] PHP Fatal error:  require() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required '/home4/indieweb/indiewebseries/public/laravel/laravel.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib64/php:/usr/lib/php:/usr/share/pear') in /home4/indieweb/indiewebseries/public/index.php on line 34

Just for reference:

// paths.php on line 62:
chdir(__DIR__);

// index.php line 34:
require path('sys').'laravel.php';

Any ideas?

EDIT: I tried @TheShiftExchange suggestion, moved everything outside of docroot, and renamed public to public_html. I now get these php errors:

[07-Feb-2013 05:38:25] PHP Warning:  chdir() [<a href='function.chdir'>function.chdir</a>]: No such file or directory (errno 2) in /home4/indieweb/paths.php on line 62
[07-Feb-2013 05:38:25] PHP Fatal error:  require() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required '/home4/indieweb/public_html/laravel/laravel.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib64/php:/usr/lib/php:/usr/share/pear') in /home4/indieweb/public_html/index.php on line 34

Answer 1

I found the solution. It turns out all my problems were irrelevant. For some reason, the PHP settings in my hosting account were reset, and all I had to do was switch the PHP version back to 5.4 to fix everything.