laravel - xampp apache rewrite not working

Question

I have a folder called crm in htdocs which contains a fresh laravel 5.1 project and i am trying to acess it via http://localhost/crm/ but it just brings the index of page containing the directory contents instead of the page mapped in my routes.php as

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('panel');
});

i have checked that apache mod_rewrite is enable in httpd.conf

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs"
<Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs">

    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI

    AllowOverride All

    Require all granted
</Directory>

then the .htaccess file in crm/public folder contains

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    <IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
        Options -MultiViews
    </IfModule>

    RewriteEngine On

    # Redirect Trailing Slashes...
    RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]

    # Handle Front Controller...
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>

I have also tried to change it to

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]

without success.

Answer 1

You need to point Laravel to public directory to make it work. For example, if you've installed Laravel in C:/xampp/htdocs/ directory, you need to use these settings:

DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/public"
<Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs/public">

Do not edit .htacces inside public folder. Try to change settings and load Laravel website by going to localhost first.

When you've edited Apache config file, you should restart web server.