As a rule of thumb Laravel will be the platform serving your app. There will be occasions though where Laravel will only be part of your app, therefore you Laravel build may not be located as the base directory.
You can put you Laravel directory where ever you want, and it will work as expected, with one caveat – public path. By adding the following line to the top of your /public/.htaccess file, it will ensure your routing resolves as it should.
RewriteBase /laravel-folder