Central Storage

Central Storage is a storage engine built in Laravel. It includes duplicate upload detection, supports on the fly image (but cached) image resize and allows you to set 'Processors' that handle more complex file transformations like video transcoding etc.

Quick start

CHeckout this code:

git clone git@github.com:CatLabInteractive/central-storage.git

Let composer install all dependencies:

composer install

Copy .env.example to .env and set the database credentials.

Set a unique app key:

php artisan key:generate

Setup the database:

php artisan migrate

Create a user (for security, there is no registration form enabled in the website)

php artisan user:create

Done! You should now be able to login on the website.

Disk configuration

Central Storage uses the default File Storage systems, so you can configure where files will be stored. The files are stored in various folders based on a hashing mechanism that should in theory improve performance when reading a lot of sequentially uploaded files.

Note that certain Processors (like the Elastic Transcoder processor) requires the files to be stored on Amazon S3.

Setting up a consumer

A 'consumer' is an application that will use central storage for storing files.

Navigate to Consumers and click Create consumer. Fill in a descriptive name.

You should now get your consumer key and consumer secret.

File resize

In order for file resizing to work, you need to either install the GD or the Imagick php extensions. In your .env file, set INTERVENTION_DRIVER=imagick accordingly. The project uses the Intervention Image library to manipulate images, so for further install instructions, take a look there.

Content delivery network

In order to use a CDN with Central Storage (like Amazon Cloudfront), point the origin of the network to your asset website and configure your Central Storage Client projects FRONT config parameter to the CDN network. This way, uploads will use the direct connection to Central Storage, but all generated links fetch content will use the CDN.

Setting up your client project (in Laravel)

Central Storage provides a standard REST API and is thus consumable by any language or framework. We will focus on the existing Laravel client here. Note that it is a trivial task to implement a new client, as there is only a few methods to implement.

In your Laravel project, run composer require catlabinteractive/central-storage-client

Then, wherever you want to upload a file, initialize the client:

$centralStorageClient = new CentralStorageClient(
    'https://your-central-storage-url.com',
    'your_key',
    'your_secret'
);

Or, if you like, you can use the provider that uses the default configuration files:

    'providers' => [
    
        [...]
        
        CatLab\CentralStorage\Client\CentralStorageServiceProvider::class,
    
    ],
    
    'aliases' => [
    
        [...]
        
        'CentralStorage' => CatLab\CentralStorage\Client\CentralStorageClientFacade::class,
    
    ]
]

The PHP client consumes Symfony's File objects. That means you can upload files straight from Laravel. The client returns an Eloquent model 'Asset', which can be saved directly to a database (migration file is available in central-storage-client/database).

<?php

use App\Models\Attachments\Asset;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class AssetController
{
    /**
     * @param Request $request
     * @return \Illuminate\Http\JsonResponse
     */
    public function upload(Request $request)
    {
        $file = $request->file()->first();
        if (!$file) {
            abort(400, 'Please provide a valid file.');
        }

        if (!$file->isValid()) {
            abort(400, 'File not valid: ' . $file->getErrorMessage());
        }

        /** @var Asset $asset */
        $asset = \CentralStorage::store($file);
        $asset->save();

        return response()->json($asset->getData());
    }
}

For further instructions on how to upload and consume assets, please check out the Central Storage Client documentation.