Valet showing files under wrong Url - laravel

Question

Currently running into issues on my server with links to files in my Laravel application.
I currently have a images folder in storage/app/public and I linked the storage/app/public folder to public with php artisan storage:link.
Now i have a image.jpg in the images folder.
On my local system while using valet I can see the image with the tow following links:
/images/image.jpg
/storage/images/image.jpg
On my server only the second one works (which I assume is correct as there is no images folder directly in the public-directory.
Problem is, I often run into issues when deploying as customers can't see images online (as the link is not working). This wouldn't be an issue if I could not see images local while testing the UI.
Anyone also has this issue and can lead me to some kind of solution?

Answer 1

The issue is that the LaravelValetDriver has a fallback test; if the file doesn't exist in the public directory then it will check the public storage directory.
You can find that here:
if ($this->isActualFile($storagePath = $sitePath.'/storage/app/public'.$storageUri)) {
return $storagePath;
}
You can prevent this behaviour by creating your own Valet Driver that extends the LaravelValetDriver and overrides the isStaticFile method, e.g:
class NoStorageFallbackLaravelValetDriver extends LaravelValetDriver
{
public function isStaticFile($sitePath, $siteName, $uri)
{
if (file_exists($staticFilePath = $sitePath. '/public' . $uri)
&& is_file($staticFilePath)) {
return $staticFilePath;
}
return false;
}
}

Answer 2

Using the public disk is straight forward and should work without problems out of the box.
The public disk uses the 'local' driver which by default uses the storage/app directory.
The command:
php artisan storage:link
will create a symbolic link 'storage' inside your public folder that links to the non-public folder storage/app/public.
When the link is working, you can use the following command:
Storage::disk('local')->put('public/file.txt', 'Contents');
This will store file.txt to
storage/app/public/file.txt
You won't be accessing the file at storage/app/public.file.txt instead you will be accessing it using the symlink public/storage...
Therefore your saved file will publicly accessible at
public/storage/file.txt
Use the asset helper you can get the location of the file:
echo asset('file.txt');