If you're hosting your Laravel project on shared hosting like Hostinger, using cPanel or hPanel, you may run into an issue where the public/storage link doesn't work as expected.

This typically happens because symlinks are restricted or not supported on many shared hosting environments. As a result, running php artisan storage:link either fails silently or has no effect — leaving your uploaded files inaccessible via the browser.

But don't worry — here's a simple workaround that doesn't require symlinks or SSH access.

Laravel normally creates a symbolic link to expose those files to the public:

public/storage → storage/app/public

The Solution: Change Filesystem Path

To make it work without symlinks, just tell Laravel to use public/storage as the root of your public disk.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open the config/filesystems.php file in your Laravel project.
  2. Find this part: 
'public' => [
    'driver' => 'local',
    'root' => storage_path('app/public'),
    'url' => env('APP_URL').'/storage',
    'visibility' => 'public',
    'throw' => false,
    'report' => false,
],
  1. Change this line: 
'root' => storage_path('app/public'),

to:

'root' => public_path('storage'),

Full updated config:

'public' => [
    'driver' => 'local',
    'root' => public_path('storage'),
    'url' => env('APP_URL').'/storage',
    'visibility' => 'public',
    'throw' => false,
    'report' => false,
],

Now Laravel will save and load files directly from the public/storage folder — no symlink required!

Just make sure the public/storage folder exists and is writable:

mkdir -p public/storage
chmod -R 755 public/storage