What is the significance of Application URL in laravel 5

When a user visits your website, Laravel gets a lot of information it needs about the request from PHP's superglobals ($_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST, etc.). Part of this information is the request URL.

For example, if you access the request methods url() or path(), this information was retrieved via the $_SERVER superglobal:

$url = Request::url();$path = Request::path();

However, artisan, commands, jobs, etc. don't have the benefit of this information. It is not a normal HTTP request coming in from the user, it is a PHP command being run from the command line. Because of this, Laravel needs a way to determine what the url of the application should be. This is where the configuration value comes in.

In your example, you plan on sending out emails from a queue. Imagine you need to include a link to a route of your website in one of the emails, so you use the UrlGenerator to get the url for the link (URL::route('route.name')). Since this code is being run inside a command, and isn't related to any type of HTTP request, the base application url will be picked up from the configuration value you set in config/app.php.

As should hopefully be a little more clear now, the url value should be set to the http url for your application, not any type of directory path. In your example, it should be http://mydomainname.com.

when on production, it should be set to

'url' => 'http://your-live-domain.com',

As you mentioned, it's going to be used by the artisan commands and queues.

You can leverage .env to store your live domain. http://laravel.com/docs/5.1#environment-configuration