Not sure what happened. Maybe a recent update? I push my code changes to my public environment from my repo with dploy.io and one of the post commands that I run are php artisan update. Not sure if a recent Laravel update changed anything.

kryptonit3@gandc:~/gandc$ php artisan --version
Laravel Framework version 5.0.14

Here is a css file that works (not 404) https://gandc.co/css/bootstrap.min.css

Here is another that is also (according to Laravel) publically accessible and has same permissions/group https://gandc.co/plugins/noUISlider/jquery.nouislider.min.css

But the second returns 404 even though it exists.

here is the one that works

kryptonit3@gandc:~/gandc/public/css$ ls -la
total 408
drwxrwxr-x 6 kryptonit3 www-data   4096 Mar 12 20:25 .
drwxrwxr-x 6 kryptonit3 www-data   4096 Mar 13 22:49 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kryptonit3 www-data 130943 Mar  6 23:51 app.css
drwxrwxr-x 2 kryptonit3 www-data   4096 Mar  6 23:47 barcode
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kryptonit3 www-data 113498 Mar  6 23:51 bootstrap.min.css
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kryptonit3 www-data   1411 Mar  6 23:51 custom.css
drwxrwxr-x 2 kryptonit3 www-data   4096 Mar 12 20:25 dropzone
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kryptonit3 www-data  23739 Mar  6 23:51 font-awesome.min.css
drwxrwxr-x 2 kryptonit3 www-data   4096 Mar 12 20:25 html5imageupload
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kryptonit3 www-data 117877 Mar  6 23:51 nifty.min.css
drwxrwxr-x 2 kryptonit3 www-data   4096 Mar  9 16:45 noUISlider

and the one that does not

kryptonit3@gandc:~/gandc/public/plugins/noUiSlider$ ls -la
total 104
drwxrwxr-x  2 kryptonit3 www-data  4096 Mar 13 22:50 .
drwxrwxr-x 31 kryptonit3 www-data  4096 Mar 13 22:49 ..
-rw-rw-r--  1 kryptonit3 www-data 57355 Mar 13 22:50 jquery.nouislider.all.js
-rw-rw-r--  1 kryptonit3 www-data 18033 Mar 13 22:50 jquery.nouislider.all.min.js
-rw-rw-r--  1 kryptonit3 www-data  3078 Mar 13 22:50 jquery.nouislider.css
-rw-rw-r--  1 kryptonit3 www-data  1978 Mar 13 22:50 jquery.nouislider.min.css
-rw-rw-r--  1 kryptonit3 www-data  1317 Mar 13 22:50 jquery.nouislider.pips.css
-rw-rw-r--  1 kryptonit3 www-data  1045 Mar 13 22:50 jquery.nouislider.pips.min.css

the kryptonit3 user is a member of www-data, and the two files are chmod 644

What gives? :\

when I move that same file to the css directory it works.

https://gandc.co/css/noUISlider/jquery.nouislider.min.css

kryptonit3@gandc:~/gandc/public/css/noUISlider$ ls -la
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 2 kryptonit3 www-data 4096 Mar  9 16:45 .
drwxrwxr-x 6 kryptonit3 www-data 4096 Mar 12 20:25 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kryptonit3 www-data 1978 Mar 15 14:02 jquery.nouislider.min.css

This one file (jquery.nouislider.min.css) is just one example. None of the files outside of the css or js folders are accessible. I was under the impression everything in the public folder was accessible.

P.S. - not an issue in my dev environment.