Laravel storage:link does not work on heroku? - php

Question

So I've been playing around with heroku and I really like it. it's fast and it just works. However i have encountered a problem with my gallery app: https://miko-gallery.herokuapp.com . Create a free account , create an album and try uploading a photo. It will not display. I have run the php artisan storage:link command, but it does not work. What am i missing here?
EDIT
I've just tried a new thing, I tried running heroku run bash and i cd'ed into storage/app/public folder, and it does not contain the folder images which was supposed to be there.
My code for saving the photo is here (works on localhost):
public function store(Request $request)
{
$ext = $request->file('items')->getClientOriginalExtension();
$filename = str_random(32).'.'.$ext;
$file = $request->file('items');
$path = Storage::disk('local')->putFileAs('public/images/photos', $file, $filename);
$photo = new Photo();
$photo->album_id = $request->album_id;
$photo->caption = $request->caption;
$photo->extension = $request->file('items')->getClientOriginalExtension();
$photo->path = $path.'.'.$photo->extension;
$photo->mime = $request->file('items')->getMimeType();
$photo->file_name = $filename;
$photo->save();
return response()->json($photo, 200);
}

Answer 1

Heroku's filesystem is dyno-local and ephemeral. Any changes you make to it will be lost the next time each dyno restarts. This happens frequently (at least once per day).
As a result, you can't store uploads on the local filesystem. Heroku's official recommendation is to use something like Amazon S3 to store uploads. Laravel supports this out of the box:
Laravel provides a powerful filesystem abstraction thanks to the wonderful Flysystem PHP package by Frank de Jonge. The Laravel Flysystem integration provides simple to use drivers for working with local filesystems, Amazon S3, and Rackspace Cloud Storage. Even better, it's amazingly simple to switch between these storage options as the API remains the same for each system.
Simply add league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 ~1.0 to your dependencies and then configure it in config/filesystems.php.

Answer 2

if you don't have ssh access then simply create a route.so you can hit this command simply by hitting url
Route::get('/artisan/storage', function() {
$command = 'storage:link';
$result = Artisan::call($command);
return Artisan::output();
})
firstly unlink existing link from storage