Magento – Magento 2.3 : Serving site from pub, now images get 404

My original installation of v2.3.0 was working fine. All images showed up for categories. I decided (after setting up a lot of categories and images for those categories) to serve the site from pub.

The only code customization my site has is a modification for a bug that is apparently fixed in v2.3.1. Other than that, i have no third party modules installed or other code customizations.

I followed docs to make site more secure using Ubuntu and Apache2 (not nginx). When i visit a page with images (front-end or admin area), i get a 404 not found for the image. Page loads text and css but console outputs:

GET http://192.168.5.10/pub/media/Shoes/nike.jpg 404 (Not Found)

What i've tried that did not work:

1. Looking for errors in /var/log/apache2/error.log and /var/log/apache2/error.log (found nothing other than a record of 404 but no permission errors.)
2. Checked magento/var/log/system.log, magento/var/log/exception.log and magento/var/log/debug.log, no permission errors.

3. Switching modes:

   bin/magento deploy:mode:set production  
   bin/magento cache:flush  
   bin/magento deploy:mode:set developer  
   bin/magento cache:flush  
   

4. Made sure had default .htaccess in magento directory.

5. Made sure pub/ had default .htaccess.

6. Doc: bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f

7. "Flush Cache Storage", "Flush Magento Cache", "Flush Catalog Images Cache", and "Flush Static Files Cache" from admin area > System > Cache Management.

8. Refresh all cache types from admin area > System > Cache Management.

9. Re-ran permissions as root cd /var/www/html/magento2 && find var generated vendor pub/static pub/media app/etc -type f -exec chmod g+w {} + && find var generated vendor pub/static pub/media app/etc -type d -exec chmod g+ws {} + && chown -R :www-data . && chmod u+x bin/magento

10. Ran alternative permissions commands (does same thing as above):

    cd /var/www/html/<magento install directory>
    find var generated vendor pub/static pub/media app/etc -type f -exec chmod g+w {} +
    find var generated vendor pub/static pub/media app/etc -type d -exec chmod g+ws {} +
    chown -R :www-data . # Ubuntu
    chmod u+x bin/magento
    

11. Checking permissions of example image from magento directory:

    magentouser$ ls -al pub/media/Shoes/nike.jpg
    -rw-rw-r-- 1 magentouser www-data 77645 Jan 15 17:14 pub/media/Shoes/nike.jpg
    

12. rm -rf var/cache

13. bin/magento indexer:reindex

14. Checked my /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

    Listen 8080
    <VirtualHost *:80>
    
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/magento2/pub
    
        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
    
    </VirtualHost>
    <Directory "/var/www/html">
    AllowOverride all
    </Directory>
    

15. Re-started systemctl restart apache2

16. Change DocumentRoot back to /var/www/html/magento2, and restarted apache2.

    Note: i was in the wrong demo server the first time i tried step 16 again. I had spun up so many test servers trying to re-duplicate the issue in different ways (too many terminals open trying to test different variations without attention to IP). I noticed while deleting all the demo servers from the network that the command was in the wrong one. After switching server 56 back to documentRoot to /var/www/html/magento2, and restarting apache on server 56, all images show up again normally. but the URL is still like (example): http://192.168.5.10/pub/media/Shoes/nike.jpg. I'm still not sure how "pub" got in there or even how i would add "pub" if it was't there and I wanted it, or how to remove it from the url and make the system look in the right place without having to re-upload all my images. This test confirmed again that when not serving from pub, the site works fine…but images appear to be already served in a strange way (unable to confirm this without a snapshot of the system before following docs to serve from "pub")

    How do you resolve this?