Laravel storage:link Not Working on cPanel? Images Missing After Deploy

I recently deployed a Laravel project to shared hosting using cPanel, and suddenly all uploaded images disappeared.

The strange part was:

• everything worked locally on Windows
• images physically existed on the server
• but production kept showing broken image icons and 403 Forbidden errors

At first, I thought the issue was related to:

• Blade templates
• image uploads
• Laravel storage
• or browser cache

But the real issue turned out to be related to:

• symbolic links (storage:link)
• Linux permissions
• Apache restrictions
• and shared hosting security settings

Some useful debugging steps included:

```bash id="d7u0f0"
php artisan optimize:clear

and:



```bash id="d5m7kc"
chmod -R 775 storage bootstrap/cache

I also had to manually inspect:

• .htaccess
• symlink targets
• and direct image URLs

The issue became even more confusing because:

• old images sometimes worked
• new uploads failed
• and direct URLs returned 403 Forbidden

I documented the full debugging process and final solution here:

https://growthawakening.com/single-post/laravel-storagelink-not-working-on-cpanel-images-missing-after-deploy

If you're deploying Laravel on shared hosting and images suddenly disappear, this may save you hours of debugging.