Displaying laravel stored images on shared hosting

Question

I have successfully deployed my first laravel application on a live server. Everything looks great except the fact that I am unable to display the images that are being uploaded to the /myproject_src/storage/app/public/myfolder1 folder.

Here is my folder hierarchy on HostGator:

/myproject_src/

Here are all the laravel source files (except the public folder)

/public_html/mydomain.com/

Here goes all my contents of the public directory

I am storing the file path into the database in the following manner:

public/myfolder1/FxEj1V1neYrc7CVUYjlcYZCUf4YnC84Z3cwaMjVX.png

This path is associated with the image that has been uploaded to storage/app/public/myfolder1/ this folder and is generated from store('public/myfolder1'); method of laravel.

What should I do in order to display the images properly in a img tag:

<img src="{{ how to point to the uploaded image here }}">

Solution 1

Well, you can create symbolic link using

php artisan storage:link

and access files using

<img src="{{ asset('public/myfolder1/image.jpg') }}" />

But sometime you can't create symbolic link if you're on shared hosting. You want to protect some files behind some access control logic, there is the alternative of having a special route that reads and serves the image. For example.

Route::get('storage/{filename}', function ($filename)
{
    $path = storage_path($filename);

    if (!File::exists($path)) {
        abort(404);
    }

    $file = File::get($path);
    $type = File::mimeType($path);

    $response = Response::make($file, 200);
    $response->header("Content-Type", $type);

    return $response;
});

Now you can access your files like this.

http://example.com/storage/public/myfolder1/image.jpg
<img src="{{ asset('storage/public/myfolder1/image.jpg') }} />

Note: I'd suggest to not store paths in the db for flexibility. Please just store file name and do the following thing in the code.

Route::get('storage/{filename}', function ($filename)
{
    // Add folder path here instead of storing in the database.
    $path = storage_path('public/myfolder1' . $filename);

    if (!File::exists($path)) {
        abort(404);
    }

    $file = File::get($path);
    $type = File::mimeType($path);

    $response = Response::make($file, 200);
    $response->header("Content-Type", $type);

    return $response;
});

and access it using

http://example.com/storage/image.jpg

Hope that helps :)

Solution 2

The simple answer here is run php artisan storage:link command manually

first, delete the storage folder inside your public folder then add this code to the top of the web.php file.

Artisan::call('storage:link');

Hope this will help you.