Removing "Public" From Laravel URL Routes On Hostinger

Table of contents

• Hypertext Access Configuration
• Code walkthrough
• Setting .htaccess on Hostinger

The Laravel framework has an index.php file within its public directory. This serves as the entry point for all incoming traffic/requests. This means the only way to access any route is to go through the /public directory.

Thus to reach /home, you would have to visit domain.tld/public/home. In the rest of this article, we will look at how to get rid of the /public sub-path from our URLs using the .htaccess config file.

Note: The discussed solution only works on systems running an Apache [↗] or Lightspeed [↗] web server [→]

Hypertext Access Configuration

There are different ways to remove the /public path from your URLs, this post will however focus on a solution using the .htaccess configuration file.

Hypertext Access or .htaccess is a configuration file that allows you to override the default behavior of an Apache webserver [↗].

In this case, we will be using it to rewrite how our web server handles routing.

• Go ahead and create a .htaccess file in the root folder of your Laravel app. I.E: laravel-app/.htaccess

Directory Structure
✅ Wrap📋
01: laravel-app
02: ├── .htaccess

• Next copy and paste the configuration below into the the newly created file.

.htaccess
✅ Wrap📋
01: RewriteEngine on
02: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.tld$ [NC,OR]
03: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.tld$ 
04: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !public/
05: RewriteRule (.*) /public/$1 [L] 

Code walkthrough

• Line 01 [→]: By setting RewriteEngine on we ensure that the Apache mod_rewrite module is enabled and ready to rewrite URLs.
• Line 02 [→]: Checks if the provided hostname matches "domain.tld"
• Line 03 [→]: Same as above but starting with www
• Line 04 [→]: Check if the requested URI does not start with "public/"
• Line 05 [→]: If all conditions are met, rewrite the URL to prepend "/public/" to the request URI

Setting .htaccess on Hostinger

• Once you are logged onto your Hostinger account, navigate to the website you would like to configure.
• From here click on the File Manager card.

• Once you land on the file manager, navigate to public_html > public
• click on the "New file" option on the left-hand navigation.
• Create a file with the name ".htaccess"
• Click on Create to save this file
• Double-click on the file i.e: .htaccess to open it
• Fill it with the configuration from this section [→]
• Click on the save icon on the far right to save the file

That should do the trick.

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