Laravel Public Files with No Symlink: in Public Folder Instead of Storage

By default, Laravel stores the uploaded public files in the storage/app/public, and you should create a so-called "symbolic link" with the Artisan command "php artisan storage:link". But what if you don't have SSH access to the Terminal and can't run this command?

One of the solutions is to store the public files in the /public folder without any storage/ or symlinks.

To do that, you need to change the configuration of your local public disk.

config/filesystems.php:

'disks' => [
    'public' => [
        'driver' => 'local',
        'root' => storage_path('app/public'), 
        'url' => env('APP_URL').'/storage', 
        'root' => public_path(), 
        'url' => env('APP_URL'), 
        'visibility' => 'public',
        'throw' => false,
    ],

Then you could use this command to access the files in public/images, for example:

$path = $request->file('avatar')->store(
    'images/something.png', 'public'
);

That file will be stored in public/images/something.png.

Assuming your web-server document root is correctly set to the public/ folder, you can access that file as https://yourwebsite.com/images/something.png.

Notice: be careful not to override the default files that come with Laravel in the /public folder. Make sure to always create subfolders for your custom uploaded files.