Store Media in an external Storage

Sulu stores its media with the flysystem file system abstraction. This allows you to configure different storage backends easily.

By default this uses the local file system storage. A list of other supported storage backends and their installation instructions can be found in the Flysystem documentation here: https://github.com/thephpleague/flysystem-bundle/blob/3.x/docs/2-cloud-storage-providers.md

The following represents the default configuration for Sulu and can be adjusted to your needs:

# config/packages/flysystem.yaml
flysystem:
    storages:
        default.storage:
            adapter: 'local'
            options:
                directory: '%kernel.project_dir%/var/storage/default'

# config/packages/sulu_media.yaml
sulu_media:
    storage:
        flysystem_service: 'default.storage'

Warning

Please check the section What About Image Formats? to avoid confusion about how image formats are handled in Sulu, and why they can’t be stored in the configured flysystem storage.

What About Image Formats?

Note

Only the original files will be uploaded to the external storage. Image Formats / Thumbnails will still be generated in the local directory. This is because image formats are generated in Sulu on demand, to explain in detail: when an image format is requested for the first time, Sulu generates the image from the original file and stores it in the public directory. The web server then acts as a kind of proxy. If the image is requested again, it checks the public directory and directly returns the previously generated image instead of regenerating it. External storages like S3, Google Cloud Storage or Azure Blob Storage do not support some kind of proxy or CDN functionality.

If you want to store the image formats in an external service you have to use a CDN like Fastly, Cloudflare or others that support caching generated image formats for a long time. Some hosters allow to configure CDN directly on specific URLs in Sulu all URLs under /uploads/media/* need to be routed through a proxy or CDN. If your chosen CDN requires a custom Domain, you can use Symfony’s CDN feature via:

{{ asset(media.thumbnail['40x40']) }}

and configure a CDN Domain in the Symfony configuration framework.assets configuration. If you have tested your proxy or CDN and it correctly caches the generated images for a long time, you can disable saving the thumbnails to the local filesystem by setting sulu_media.format_cache.save_image to false in config/packages/sulu_media.yaml, it is recommend to use an ENV variable to locally still use it.

Important: Never disable the format cache unless you have set up a CDN or proxy. Otherwise, your server will regenerate the image format on every request, which can overwhelm your server, as image generation is resource-intensive.