I'm assuming this is basic FTP access? You may wish to look for a better hosting solution and maybe some revision control else you are probably stuck, and changing paths is probably be the way forward. I have no idea how to achieve what you are after.

Try https://forge.laravel.com/ and if you have no revision control look into https://github.com/

Thanks jacksoncharles.

My question then would be, why would a developer create a project in Laravel if it cannot be published? Surely the aim is not to forever remain as a localhost app on a personal computer - right?

As I say, I'm new to Laravel so perhaps I'm missing something!

I think the issue is with your hosting package, not Laravel. Probably can be published on your current solution but I suggest your development skills have outgrown your hosting solution.

I take that as a compliment ;)

Thanks for your input jacksoncharles. Am I right in assuming then that Laravel based sites are deployed through something like Git?

Pretty much clintbarron. Push code with git then pull in dependencies with composer, maybe some post-hooks to execute any migrations and so on. Copy/pasting code through FTP is behind you :)

I haven't tried it myself, but you should be able to change public path in bootstrap/paths.php from

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

and rename the folder as well. There could be something else you'd have to do but it's worth a shot.

Right here on this very forum there was recently a very detailed answer to this very question. Either search or scroll through and you'll probably see it. Again it was very very detailed in exactly what to do. I saved this part from thread:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16683046/how-to-install-laravel-4-to-a-web-host-subfolder-without-publicly-exposing-app

I didn't save the laravel thread sorry.

Thanks jimgwhit. I did search initially but I will look some more.

And thanks to all who have commented above, much appreciated.

On my shared host I ran into a problem where I couldnt event FTP files above root so I had to find another solution. This may be slightly off what you looking for but if you dont have any success you could simply place all your files in public_html and modify the root .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteEngine On
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^public
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

This would prevent you having to change all sorts of settings and FTPg the entire project up wouldnt require changing directories and FTPg different files into different locations.

Im not 100% sure of how protected the source files are using .htaccess but im quite confident the source files will be difficult to access even tho they are sitting in the public_html.