Avoid public folder of laravel and open directly the root in web server

Create .htaccess in root folder and write these line

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

For production server it is recommended that you point your domain directly to the public folder

Let's assume you have this folder structure in your server

.cpanel/
public_html/
public_ftp/
..

And the laravel folder structure is

app/
bootstrap/
public/
vendor/
composer.json
artisan
..

You can create a folder name mylaravelsite on your server inline with public_html and public_ftp folder, and copy to it the whole laravel application except the public folder because you will paste all of it contents on the public_html, so you have now:

.cpanel/
public_html/
public_html/packages
public_html/vendor
public_html/index.php
public_html/.htaccess
...
public_ftp/
mylaravelsite/
mylaravelsite/app
mylaravelsite/bootstrap
...

On your public_html/index.php change the following line:

require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/autoload.php';

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/start.php';

to

require __DIR__.'/../mylaravelsite/bootstrap/autoload.php';

$app = require_once __DIR__.'/../mylaravelsite/bootstrap/start.php';

and also don't forget to change /mylaravelsite/bootstrap/paths.php public path, you might use it.

'public' => __DIR__.'/../public',

to

'public' => __DIR__.'/../../public_html',

Your site should be running.

It sounds like the information you are missing is:

Documentroot

This is also called the "web root". Apache specifically calls it the DocumentRoot - Click that link for the official explanation.

Basically what it does is set which directory the server pulls files from. In Laravel, the document root should be the public folder.

Setting the DocumentRoot to public means that going to http://mylaravelsite.com in the browser will infact be "pointing" to the public folder as you want.

In the .htaccess file (actually, more likely in the virtual host configuration), you can set the DocumentRoot for your site:

DocumentRoot /path/to/laravel-app/public

How you set this up depends on your hosting. Each hosting has different ways to setup a website and so we cannot answer that specifically for you - you should consult your web hostings tech support. The key point is that the public directory should be the web root, while everything else should be "behind the web root".

Fair warning tho: some hosting providers do not give you enough access to accomplish that.