Assets in the public directory not showing in Laravel 5

I am having issues with assets in the /public directory in Laravel 5.4 and Laravel 5.5.

On a fresh install of Laravel, nothing in the public directory will work without /public in the URL.

When I run php artisan make:auth, the views that are created are supposed to be perfect, right? Well, what I get is an unstyled page which only looks pretty when I use the DOM inspector to add /public so that I end up with:

<link href="http://localhost/l5.4/public/css/app.css" rel="stylesheet">

Where can I change the setting so that I don't have to add /public in the views each time I want to link to an asset?

Solution

You don't have to do that manually there is a function shipped with laravel: {{asset('css/app.css')}} this access directly the public folder.

Note:

If that doesn't work then you're high probably need to set up a virtualHost that points on you /public folder. You can do that in your vHosts file on Apache.

Note2:

If you're on a shared hosting per example, or you can't modify your vHost file for a reason or an other, here is the solution you've got.

First, you have to put your public folder above the project folder and rename it per example public_folder, inside it, you'll have to put the content of the public folder.

/public_folder
/your_project_folder
  app/
  databases/
  ...

Second, inside the public folder you will find a file called index.php you have to modify it as follows:

require __DIR__.'/../your_project_folder/bootstrap/autoload.php';
$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../your_project_folder/bootstrap/app.php';

That means you're referencing the project folder from the public folder we created above.

Note3:

To tell laravel that the asset function going to be referenced from the new location of our public folder, you can add this to your index.php, after $app=require_once... :

$app->bind('path.public', function() {
    return __DIR__;
});

Hope it makes sense