Filesystem

Introduction#

Laravel Zero ships with Laravel's filesystem component, powered by the Flysystem PHP package. It provides simple drivers for working with local filesystems, SFTP, and Amazon S3 — there is no component to install.

By default, Laravel Zero configures a single local disk rooted at your application's storage/app directory.

The Storage Facade#

The Storage facade may be used to interact with any of your configured disks:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;

Storage::put('reminders.txt', 'Task 1');

$contents = Storage::get('reminders.txt');

If you would like to configure additional disks — for example, an Amazon S3 disk — create a config/filesystems.php configuration file in your application. Its structure is identical to the one used by Laravel.

The File Facade#

When you need to work with absolute paths on the machine running your application, rather than with a configured disk, the File facade is often a better fit:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File;

File::put('/path/to/reminders.txt', 'Task 1');

$contents = File::get('/path/to/reminders.txt');

Writing Files From a Build#

Once your application has been compiled into a PHAR archive, you can no longer add, update, or delete files inside of it. Since the default local disk is rooted at storage/app — a path within the archive — writing to it will fail.

Instead, you should write to a location on the user's machine, such as the current working directory or a dedicated directory inside their home directory.

Using the Storage Facade#

To keep using the Storage facade, create a config/filesystems.php configuration file that roots the local disk outside of your build:

<?php

return [
    'default' => 'local',

    'disks' => [
        'local' => [
            'driver' => 'local',
            'root' => \Phar::running()
                ? getcwd()
                : storage_path('app'),
        ],
    ],
];

The Storage facade may then be used exactly as before:

Storage::put('reminders.txt', 'Task 1');

Note: The current working directory is only one option. The system temporary directory, via sys_get_temp_dir(), or a "dot" directory inside the user's home directory are both good choices as well.

Using the File Facade#

The File facade already works with absolute paths, so it requires no configuration. You only need to build the path yourself:

File::put(getcwd().'/reminders.txt', 'Task 1');