How to Remove ‘Public’ from URL in Laravel PHP Framework?

When deploying a Laravel application on shared hosting, you may encounter the common issue of the “public” folder appearing in your website’s URL. This can make your URLs less elegant and user-friendly. In this tutorial, we’ll explore two effective solutions to remove “public” from the URL in Laravel 10.

Why Remove ‘Public’ from Laravel URL?

Before we dive into the solutions, it’s essential to understand why we need to remove “public” from the Laravel URL. When you upload a Laravel application to shared hosting, you often can’t set the path directly to the index.php file. As a result, you must run the application from the “public” folder, which can lead to URLs like yourwebsite.com/public/index.php. This is far from ideal, and we’ll show you how to clean it up.

Solution 1: Removing ‘Public’ Using .htaccess

In Laravel, the .htaccess file plays a crucial role in URL rewriting and can be used to eliminate “public” from your URLs. Follow these steps:

• Create a New .htaccess File: Go to the root folder of your Laravel application and create a new .htaccess file.
• Edit .htaccess: Open the newly created .htaccess file and add the following code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On 
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

• Save and Upload: Save the changes and upload the .htaccess file to the root directory of your Laravel application.

This .htaccess code uses Apache’s mod_rewrite module to redirect all requests to the “public” folder, effectively removing “public” from the URL.

Solution 2: Rename server.php and Move .htaccess

To further clean up your Laravel URLs, follow these steps:

1. Rename server.php: In your Laravel root folder, rename the server.php file to index.php.
2. Move .htaccess: Locate the .htaccess file within the /public directory of your Laravel application. Copy it and paste it into your Laravel root folder.
3. Move Assets: If your application has CSS and JS files in the “public” folder, move them to the root folder as well. Be sure to update the references to these assets in your views and layouts.

These steps effectively route all incoming requests to the index.php file and streamline your URLs.

Conclusion

Removing “public” from your Laravel 10 application’s URL is a crucial step to make your website URLs more user-friendly. You can choose between using a .htaccess file or renaming files and moving the .htaccess for achieving this goal. By following these solutions, your Laravel application will have cleaner, more professional-looking URLs, improving user experience and SEO rankings.