Laravel as an addon to an existing site - php

Question

I have my site already built up in say: http://example.com
My Directory structure is:
root/
|
-- htdocs/ ---> This is the document root. All the front end scripts are located here.
| |
| - css/
| - ...
|
-- cms/ --> This is the backend. This site is like a cms Driven Site.
Now I wanted to install laravel in the back end. I want to build my CMS using laravel. But I don't want the URL to be like: http://example.com/cms/public/
I want it just to be: http://example.com/cms/
I know, I can just place all the folders outside in the document root and rename the public folder and change some settings to achieve what I want. But I don't want my document root to have all those files & folders and files mixed with my front end related files & folders. I want this whole thing to be separate and easy to use in other web site back end.
In order to achieve this, I have used 2 .htaccess files.
In the document root, I have:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^cms/$ cms/public/ [L]
RewriteRule ^cms/(.*)$ cms/public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
And inside the cms folder I have:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
I am not very good at writing .htaccess or doing mod_rewrite.
Can anybody help me

Answer 1

You could achieve what you want in this way:
Create a directory junction for the public folder from laravel to your backend target folder:
mklink /J C:\www\htdocs\app-frontend\cms C:\www\htdocs\app-backend\public
The first path is for the alias and the second path is for the real folder. Here app-backend would be the folder where laravel is installed to.
This is how I deal with Laravel in shared hosting.
If you were to opt for the mod_rewrite approach, the .env file will be exposed.