Can't make a public storage folder in laravel 5.2

My laravel project is setup with storage like this:

-storage
  -app
  -services

And I have a filesystem setup for the app folder but I just recently setup a new one for services like so

    services' => [
        'driver'     => 'local',
        'root'       => public_path('services'),
        'visibility' => 'public'
    ],

My issue is that now when I get a file out of that folder and use the URL on the frontend, it says the document can't be found and it's because the URL actually prints out like this:

/storage/testfile.txt

where I'm expecting

/storage/services/testfile.txt

but I can't seem to get the URL to show correctly with this controller code:

    $file1 = 'testfile.txt';
    $file2 = 'test2.txt';

    $url1 = Storage::disk('services')->url($file1);
    $url2 = Storage::disk('services')->url($file2);



    if(Storage::disk('services')->exists($file1)){
        $files[1] = public_path($url1);
    }

    if(Storage::disk('services')->exists($file2)){
        $files[2] = public_path($url2);
    }

    $PDFfiles = json_encode($files);

    dd($PDFfiles);

I don't really know how I can change this to link to a public folder, but I currently have no public driver in my filesystems.php file and in my public folder there is no storage folder at all

I"m running laravel 5.2 so I can't run php artisan storage::link either

How can I fix this so that I can display a file on my webpage with a public URL?

via Chebli Mohamed