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Adding a New Storage Adapter

This document is part of the Appwrite contributors' guide. Before you continue reading this document make sure you have read the Code of Conduct and the Contributing Guide.

Getting Started​

Agenda​

Storage providers help us use various storage services to store our Appwrite data. As of the writing of these lines we already support Local storage, AWS S3 storage and Digitalocean Spaces storage.

As the storage library is separated into utopia-php/storage, adding a new storage adapter will consist of two phases. First adding and implementing the new adapter in the utopia-php/storage and then adding support to the new storage adapter in Appwrite.

Phase 1​

In phase 1, we will introduce and implement the new device adapter in utopia-php/storage library.

Add new adapter​

Add a new storage adapter inside the src/Storage/Device/ folder. Use one of the existing ones as a reference. The new adapter class should extend Device class and implement all the required methods.

Note that the class name should start with a capital letter as PHP FIG standards suggest.

Always use properly named environment variables if any credentials are required.

Introduce new device constant​

Introduce newly added device constant in src/Storage/Storage.php alongside existing device constants. The device constant should start with const DEVICE_<name of device> as the existing ones.

Introduce new device tests​

Add tests for the newly added device adapter inside tests/Storage/Device. Use the existing adapter tests as a reference. The test file and class should be properly named <Adapter class name>Test.php and class should be <Adapter class name>Test

Run and verify tests​

Run tests using vendor/bin/phpunit --configuration phpunit.xml and verify that everything is working correctly.

If everything goes well, create a new pull request in utopia-php/storage library.

Phase 2​

In this phase we will add support to the new storage adapter in Appwrite.

  • Note for this to happen, your PR in the first phase should have been merged and a new version of utopia-php/storage library released.

Upgrade the utopia-php/storage dependency​

Upgrade the utopia-php/storage dependency in composer.json file.

Introduce new environment variables​

Introduce new environment variables if the adapter requires new configuration information or to pass in credentials. The storage environment variables are prefixed as _APP_STORAGE_DEVICE. Please read Adding Environment Variables guidelines in order to properly introduce new environment variables.

Implement the device case​

In app/controllers/shared/api.php inside init function, there are switch/case statements for each supported storage device. Implement the instantiation of your device type for your device case. The device cases are the device constants listed in the uptopa-php/storage/Storage class.

Test and verify everything works​

To test you can switch to your newly added device using _APP_STORAGE_DEVICE environment variable. Then run docker compose build && docker compose up -d in order to build the containers with updated changes. Once the containers are running, login to Appwrite console and create a project. Then in the storage section, try to upload, preview, delete files.

If everything goes well, initiate a pull request to appwrite repository.