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

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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…