Hi there @rockoo,

This happens as the DigitalOcean App platform is based on Kubernetes, meaning that each deployment is a separate immutable container.

So after each redeployment, all changes to the container will be lost.

To sort this out, you need to use an Object Storage, like the DigitalOcean Spaces.

To do so, you can follow the instructions from step 5 of this tutorial here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-scalable-laravel-6-application-using-managed-databases-and-object-storage

Basically, what you need to do is:

• Include the additional package so that you could use the s3 driver:

composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3

• Add the following details to your .env file:

DO_SPACES_KEY=EXAMPLE7UQOTHDTF3GK4
DO_SPACES_SECRET=exampleb8e1ec97b97bff326955375c5
DO_SPACES_ENDPOINT=https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com
DO_SPACES_REGION=ams3
DO_SPACES_BUCKET=sammy-travellist

• Then in your Storage config at config/filesystems.php you need to define the details for your S3 bucket as follows:

'spaces' => [
   'driver' => 's3',
   'key' => env('DO_SPACES_KEY'),
   'secret' => env('DO_SPACES_SECRET'),
   'endpoint' => env('DO_SPACES_ENDPOINT'),
   'region' => env('DO_SPACES_REGION'),
   'bucket' => env('DO_SPACES_BUCKET'),
],

Still, in the same file, locate the cloud entry and change it to set the new spaces disk as the default cloud filesystem disk:

'cloud' => env('FILESYSTEM_CLOUD', 'spaces'),

• Then in your controllers, in order to upload an image to the DigitalOcean Space, you can do the following:

<?php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;

   public function uploadPhoto(Request $request)
   {

       $photo->image = $request->image->store('/', 'spaces');
       Storage::setVisibility($photo->image, 'public');
       $photo->save();

       return redirect()->route('home');
   }

• To access the images in your Blade views, you would use the following:

<img src="{{ asset('storage') . '/' . $photo->image }}" />

Once you implement the S3 driver or the DigitalOcean Space, you will have persistent storage, so when your users upload images via your app, the images will not be uploaded to the container inside the DigitalOcean App itself, but the S3 bucket, so once the container gets redeployed your images will stay intact on the object storage.

Hope that this helps. Let me know how it goes.
Best,
Bobby