Laravel 5 zipArchive to Storage vs to public

Question

In my Larevel app, I would like to put together some files to a zip file for the client to download. I prefer not to put the zip in the public folder. so I create a "tobedownload" folder in my "/storage" folder and plan to put the zip file there. but I got Whoops error:

"ZipArchive::close(): Failure to create temporary file: No such file or directory"   

My sample code is like this: (say, the file needs to be put into zip is "whatever.PNG" in the public folder. No worries, I won't use files in this location in real implementation. the example archive file is named "AllDocuments.zip" itis under storage/tobedownload folder).
public function downloadzip(){

     Storage::makeDirectory('tobedownload',$mode=0775); 

   $path=storage_path('tobedownload');
   $public_dir=public_path();

   $zipFileName = 'AllDocuments.zip';


    $zip=new ZipArchive(); 

    if ($zip->open( $path. '/' .$zipFileName, ZipArchive::CREATE))
    {
        $zip->addFile($public_dir.'/whatever.PNG' ); //where the file needs to be add to archive
        $zip->close();

    }

}

But say, if I put my new zip file in the public folder,I am able to create the zip. the following example code works.
public function downloadzip(){ //seems everthing works if I put the archive in the public folder

   $public_dir=public_path();

   $zipFileName = 'AllDocuments.zip';


    $zip=new ZipArchive(); 

    if ($zip->open( $public_dir. '/' .$zipFileName, ZipArchive::CREATE))
    {
        $zip->addFile($public_dir.'/whatever.PNG' ); //where the file needs to be add to archive
        $zip->close();

    }

}

I suspect it is the permission issue but I already set the storage 0755. Thanks for any helps... I am on Laravel 5.6.

Answer 1

OK.I think I figured it out. the folder was wrong. when you make directory on storage. Storage::disk('local')->makeDirectory('yourfolder') the folder you create is on /storage/app/yourfolder instead of on /storage/yourfolder.

So in my previous code, change $path=storage_path('tobedownload'); to $path=storage_path('app/tobedownload'); makes it work.