Laravel storage sym:link not working in local environment - laravel

Question

I am using the default laravel folder structure and the filesystem public:
'public' => [
'driver' => 'local',
'root' => storage_path('app/public'),
'url' => env('APP_URL') . '/storage',
'visibility' => 'public',
],
Everything runs on docker and the complete laravel folder is mounted into /var/www/html:
#... Laravel PHP-FPM service definition
volumes:
- "./:/var/www/html"
#...
When I run php artisan storage:link and then cd /var/www/html/public and ls -la I see that the symlink exists:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32 May 5 11:19 storage -> /var/www/html/storage/app/public
If i then check to see if the linked folder also exists in the container cd /var/www/html/storage/app/public everything is there as expected.
Also, when checking ls -la /var/www/html/public/storage/ directly it shows me the content of the linked folder. So everything is working from symlink perspective
# ls -la /var/www/html/public/storage/
total 512
drwxr-xr-x 4 www-data www-data 128 May 5 11:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 www-data www-data 352 Apr 19 14:03 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 14 Feb 16 16:58 .gitignore
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 519648 May 5 10:58 sample.png
However, when opening the url /storage/sample.png the server returns 404.
The remaining contents of /var/www/html/public do work fine, so for example /var/www/html/public/test.png is visible under localhost/test.png.
On production, everything works fine though. Any ideas why the symbolic link is not working on the local system while the link is actually correct?
I already tried removing the storage link and setting the symlink again.

Answer 1

You mentioned that you are using docker. I think the reason that it doesn't work locally, but in production, could be that there is a configuration shift between the two deployments.
For it to work the Nginx container must have access to the storage folder, since it is supposed to serve assets that are located there. I'm guessing that is currently not the case and only the public folder is mounted.
Check if the entire project or both ./public and ./storage are mounted into the Nginx container.
Something like this:
services:
#...
nginx:
#...
volumes:
- "./public:/var/www/html/public:ro"
- "./storage/app:/var/www/html/storage/app:ro"
#...

Answer 2

Add these lines on file configuration of nginx:
location ^~ /storage/ {
root "/var/www/html/public/storage/"
}
Every time when the request start with storage, will access directly the shared path.

Answer 3

It's important to make sure your symlink is created from inside the docker container.
If you run storage:link from outside of your container, the symlink will be relative to your local machine.
Get into the container by running:
docker exec -it name_of_your_php_container bash
Once you are inside, you should be able to run php artisan