I was working on a project that dealt with generating large .zip exports and as a result, the storage/exports directory, which was used to store all the .zip exports, ended up going all the way up to a whopping size of 10 gigabytes! 😮

I resolved it by calling the Filesystem package in my controller:

<?php
use Illuminate\Filesystem\Filesystem;
?>

Then simply, create a new instance and define the directory you wanted to clear:

<?php
$folder = new Filesystem;
$folder->cleanDirectory('storage/exports');
?>

Hope this helps you out!