Laravel provides a powerful filesystem abstraction thanks to the wonderful Flysystem PHP package by Frank de Jonge. The Laravel Flysystem integration provides simple drivers for working with local filesystems, SFTP, and Amazon S3. Even better, it's amazingly simple to switch between these storage options between your local development machine and production server as the API remains the same for each system.

Laravel's filesystem configuration file is located at config/filesystems.php. Within this file, you may configure all of your filesystem "disks". Each disk represents a particular storage driver and storage location. Example configurations for each supported driver are included in the configuration file so you can modify the configuration to reflect your storage preferences and credentials.

The local driver interacts with files stored locally on the server running the Laravel application while the s3 driver is used to write to Amazon's S3 cloud storage service.

[!NOTE] You may configure as many disks as you like and may even have multiple disks that use the same driver.

When using the local driver, all file operations are relative to the root directory defined in your filesystems configuration file. By default, this value is set to the storage/app directory. Therefore, the following method would write to storage/app/example.txt:

The public disk included in your application's filesystems configuration file is intended for files that are going to be publicly accessible. By default, the public disk uses the local driver and stores its files in storage/app/public.

To make these files accessible from the web, you should create a symbolic link from public/storage to storage/app/public. Utilizing this folder convention will keep your publicly accessible files in one directory that can be easily shared across deployments when using zero down-time deployment systems like Envoyer.

To create the symbolic link, you may use the storage:link Artisan command:

Once a file has been stored and the symbolic link has been created, you can create a URL to the files using the asset helper:

You may configure additional symbolic links in your filesystems configuration file. Each of the configured links will be created when you run the storage:link command:

The storage:unlink command may be used to destroy your configured symbolic links:

Before using the S3 driver, you will need to install the Flysystem S3 package via the Composer package manager:

An S3 disk configuration array is located in your config/filesystems.php configuration file. Typically, you should configure your S3 information and credentials using the following environment variables which are referenced by the config/filesystems.php configuration file:

For convenience, these environment variables match the naming convention used by the AWS CLI.

Before using the FTP driver, you will need to install the Flysystem FTP package via the Composer package manager:

Laravel's Flysystem integrations work great with FTP; however, a sample configuration is not included with the framework's default config/filesystems.php configuration file. If you need to configure an FTP filesystem, you may use the configuration example below:

Before using the SFTP driver, you will need to install the Flysystem SFTP package via the Composer package manager:

Laravel's Flysystem integrations work great with SFTP; however, a sample configuration is not included with the framework's default config/filesystems.php configuration file. If you need to configure an SFTP filesystem, you may use the configuration example below:

Scoped disks allow you to define a filesystem where all paths are automatically prefixed with a given path prefix. Before creating a scoped filesystem disk, you will need to install an additional Flysystem package via the Composer package manager:

You may create a path scoped instance of any existing filesystem disk by defining a disk that utilizes the scoped driver. For example, you may create a disk which scopes your existing s3 disk to a specific path prefix, and then every file operation using your scoped disk will utilize the specified prefix:

"Read-only" disks allow you to create filesystem disks that do not allow write operations. Before using the read-only configuration option, you will need to install an additional Flysystem package via the Composer package manager:

Next, you may include the read-only configuration option in one or more of your disk's configuration arrays:

By default, your application's filesystems configuration file contains a disk configuration for the s3 disk. In addition to using this disk to interact with Amazon S3, you may use it to interact with any S3 compatible file storage service such as MinIO or DigitalOcean Spaces.

Typically, after updating the disk's credentials to match the credentials of the service you are planning to use, you only need to update the value of the endpoint configuration option. This option's value is typically defined via the AWS_ENDPOINT environment variable:

In order for Laravel's Flysystem integration to generate proper URLs when using MinIO, you should define the AWS_URL environment variable so that it matches your application's local URL and includes the bucket name in the URL path:

[!WARNING] Generating temporary storage URLs via the temporaryUrl method is not supported when using MinIO.

The Storage facade may be used to interact with any of your configured disks. For example, you may use the put method on the facade to store an avatar on the default disk. If you call methods on the Storage facade without first calling the disk method, the method will automatically be passed to the default disk:

If your application interacts with multiple disks, you may use the disk method on the Storage facade to work with files on a particular disk:

Sometimes you may wish to create a disk at runtime using a given configuration without that configuration actually being present in your application's filesystems configuration file. To accomplish this, you may pass a configuration array to the Storage facade's build method:

The get method may be used to retrieve the contents of a file. The raw string contents of the file will be returned by the method. Remember, all file paths should be specified relative to the disk's "root" location:

If the file you are retrieving contains JSON, you may use the json method to retrieve the file and decode its contents:

The exists method may be used to determine if a file exists on the disk:

The missing method may be used to determine if a file is missing from the disk:

The download method may be used to generate a response that forces the user's browser to download the file at the given path. The download method accepts a filename as the second argument to the method, which will determine the filename that is seen by the user downloading the file. Finally, you may pass an array of HTTP headers as the third argument to the method:

You may use the url method to get the URL for a given file. If you are using the local driver, this will typically just prepend /storage to the given path and return a relative URL to the file. If you are using the s3 driver, the fully qualified remote URL will be returned:

When using the local driver, all files that should be publicly accessible should be placed in the storage/app/public directory. Furthermore, you should create a symbolic link at public/storage which points to the storage/app/public directory.

[!WARNING] When using the local driver, the return value of url is not URL encoded. For this reason, we recommend always storing your files using names that will create valid URLs.

If you would like to modify the host for URLs generated using the Storage facade, you may add or change the url option in the disk's configuration array:

Using the temporaryUrl method, you may create temporary URLs to files stored using the s3 driver. This method accepts a path and a DateTime instance specifying when the URL should expire:

If you need to specify additional S3 request parameters, you may pass the array of request parameters as the third argument to the temporaryUrl method:

If you need to customize how temporary URLs are created for a specific storage disk, you can use the buildTemporaryUrlsUsing method. For example, this can be useful if you have a controller that allows you to download files stored via a disk that doesn't typically support temporary URLs. Usually, this method should be called from the boot method of a service provider: