Laravel Route Controller issue - laravel

Question

I am trying to add a new route to my application and can't seem to get it to work. I keep getting a 404 error. It looks like the physical path is looking at the wrong directory. Currently looking at D:\Web\FormMapper\blog\public\forms but should be looking at D:\Web\FormMapper\blog\resources\view\layout\pages\forms.blade.php
My request URL:
http://localhost/FormMapper/ /works fine
http://localhost/FormMapper/forms /doesn't work
http://localhost/FormMapper/forms.php /No input file specified.
my FormsController:
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
class FormsController extends Controller
{
public function index()
{
return view('layouts.pages.forms');
}
}
My web.php:
Route::get('/', function () {
return view('layouts/pages/login');
});
Route::get('/forms', 'FormsController#index');
My folder structure looks like this:
My config/view.php
return [
'paths' => [
resource_path('views'),
],
'compiled' => env(
'VIEW_COMPILED_PATH',
realpath(storage_path('framework/views'))
),
];

Answer 1

you must use dot for this. In your controller change to this:
return view('layouts.pages.forms');

Answer 2

If your route only needs to return a view, you may use the Route::view method. Like the redirect method, this method provides a simple shortcut so that you do not have to define a full route or controller. The view method accepts a URI as its first argument and a view name as its second argument. In addition, you may provide an array of data to pass to the view as an optional third argument:
Route::view('/', 'layouts.pages.login');
Route::view('/forms', 'layouts.pages.forms', ['foo' => 'bar']);
Check docs

Answer 3

After tracking digging deeper I determined that the issue was that IIS requires URL rewrite rules in place for Laravel to work properly. The index.php and '/' route would work b/c it was the default page but any other pages wouldn't. To test this I used the
php artisan serve
approach to it. and everything worked properly. Unfortunately I am unable to do this in production so I needed to get it to work with IIS.