How to get file URL using Storage facade in laravel 5?

This method exists since Laravel 5.4, you can get it by:

$path = Storage::disk('public')->path($filename);

Edit: Solution for L5.2+

There's a better and more straightforward solution.

Use Storage::url($filename) to get the full path/URL of a given file. Note that you need to set S3 as your storage filesystem in config/filesystems.php: 'default' => 's3'

Of course, you can also do Storage::disk('s3')->url($filename) in the same way.

As you can see in config/filesystems.php there's also a parameter 'cloud' => 's3' defined, that refers to the Cloud filesystem. In case you want to mantain the storage folder in the local server but retrieve/store some files in the cloud use Storage::cloud(), which also has the same filesystem methods, i.e. Storage::cloud()->url($filename).

The Laravel documentation doesn't mention this method, but if you want to know more about it you can check its source code here.

This is how I got it to work - switching between s3 and local directory paths with an environment variable, passing the path to all views.

In .env:

APP_FILESYSTEM=local or s3
S3_BUCKET=BucketID

In config/filesystems.php:

'default' => env('APP_FILESYSTEM'),

In app/Providers/AppServiceProvider:

public function boot()
{
    view()->share('dynamic_storage', $this->storagePath());
}

protected function storagePath()
{
    if (Storage::getDefaultDriver() == 's3') {
        return Storage::getDriver()
                ->getAdapter()
                ->getClient()
                ->getObjectUrl(env('S3_BUCKET'), '');
    }

    return URL::to('/');
}

The Path to your Storage disk would be :

$storagePath  = Storage::disk('local')->getDriver()->getAdapter()->getPathPrefix()

I don't know any shorter solutions to that...

You could share the $storagePath to your Views and then just call

$storagePath."/myImg.jpg";