Laravel: Up and Running

Chapter 14. Storage and Retrieval

We covered how to store data in relational databases in Chapter 8, but there’s a lot more that can be stored, both locally and remotely. In this chapter we’ll cover filesystem and in-memory storage, file uploads and manipulation, nonrelational data stores, sessions, the cache, cookies, and full-text search.

Local and Cloud File Managers

Laravel provides a series of file manipulation tools through the Storage facade, and a few helper functions.

Laravel’s filesystem access tools can connect to the local filesystem as well as S3, Rackspace, and FTP. The S3 and Rackspace file drivers are provided by Flysystem, and it’s simple to add additional Flysystem providers to your Laravel app—for example, Dropbox or WebDAV.

Configuring File Access

The definitions for Laravel’s file manager live in config/filesystems.php. Each connection is called a “disk,” and Example 14-1 lists the disks that are available out of the box.

Example 14-1. Default available storage disks

...
'disks' => [
    'local' => [
        'driver' => 'local',
        'root' => storage_path('app'),
    ],

    'public' => [
        'driver' => 'local',
        'root' => storage_path('app/public'),
        'visibility' => 'public',
    ],

    's3' => [
        'driver' => 's3',
        'key' => 'your-key',
        'secret' => 'your-secret',
        'region' => 'your-region',
        'bucket' => 'your-bucket',
    ],
],

The storage_path() helper

The storage_path() helper used in Example 14-1 links to Laravel’s configured storage directory, storage/. Anything you pass to it is added to the ...