How do I change public/ directory name in Laravel 9 - laravel-9

Question

I have seen a question with a very similar title on SO from 3 months ago but it has no answers.
After a fresh laravel 9 installation what are the minimum steps to put the laravel application into it's own directory, and also modify the public directory name? It would be handy to have a step by step guide with laravel 9 specific one as I can't seem to find one anywhere.
eg. the following root directory structure:
laravel-app/ (contains all laravel files like resources/ and storage/)
public_html/ (contains index.php and /js etc)
Using the old process (similar to this https://github.com/hannanstd/change-laravel-public) I have always used no longer works, and this seems to have something to do with vite that laravel 9 uses instead of laravel-mix. It works up to the point of running php artisan serve but fails when running npm run dev with vite. Giving this error:
$ npm run dev
> dev
> vite
(!) Could not auto-determine entry point from rollupOptions or html files and there are no explicit optimizeDeps.include patterns. Skipping dependency
pre-bundling.
node:internal/fs/utils:347
throw err;
^
Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'public\hot'
at Object.openSync (node:fs:594:3)
at Object.writeFileSync (node:fs:2207:35)
at Server.<anonymous> (D:\Websites\laravel9-admin\laravel-core\node_modules\laravel-vite-plugin\dist\index.js:122:34)
at Object.onceWrapper (node:events:627:28)
at Server.emit (node:events:525:35)
at emitListeningNT (node:net:1466:10)
at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:82:21) {
errno: -4058,
syscall: 'open',
code: 'ENOENT',
path: 'public\\hot'
}
So it seems that yet somewhere else the default "public/" is defined, but after searching with ctrl+shift+F in my project it doesn't seem to be anywhere that matters so really unsure where it's getting it from. Any help is highly appreciated, but really a step by step guide on how to achieve this for Laravel 9 is the end goal so it can be a reference for myself and other users with the same problem :)

Answer 1

Answering this myself as found the solution!
First Option: Just rename the public/ directory, for laravel 9:
Rename public folder to public_html (or any desired name)
Edit AppServiceProviver.php and add below code in register method:
$this->app->bind('path.public', function() {
return realpath(base_path().'/public_html');
});
Add publicDirectory: 'public_html' to laravel-core/vite.config.js within the plugins / laravel object, eg.
export default defineConfig({
plugins: [
laravel({
publicDirectory: 'public_html',
input: [
'resources/sass/app.scss',
'resources/js/app.js',
],
refresh: true,
}),
],
});
Second option: Seperate out the laravel core files into their own directory and also rename the public/ directory, for laravel 9:
Rename public folder to public_html (or any desired name)
Create a laravel-core directory and move all files and folders except public_html into the laravel-core folder.
Edit index.php in public_html folder and find/replace __DIR__.'/../ with __DIR__.'/../laravel-core/ (3 cases)
Edit AppServiceProviver.php and add below code in register method:
$this->app->bind('path.public', function() {
return realpath(base_path().'/../public_html');
});
Add publicDirectory: 'public_html' to laravel-core/vite.config.js within the plugins / laravel object, eg.
export default defineConfig({
plugins: [
laravel({
publicDirectory: '../public_html',
input: [
'resources/sass/app.scss',
'resources/js/app.js',
],
refresh: true,
}),
],
});