Handling Laravel file uploads using S3.

One of the most lovable traits of Laravel is the ease of integrating services like authentication, mailing, file uploads, etc. which are otherwise very cumbersome to setup from scratch. For that matter, let’s look into how we setup file uploads using AWS S3 in Laravel.

Firstly, we create a new S3 bucket in our AWS console using the default settings. After creating the bucket, we add a new IAM user so that we can access the S3 bucket from our Laravel application. The new IAM user is granted permission for S3FullAccess, i.e. the user can perform all CRUD operations. After the user is created, we copy the access and secret keys and put them corresponding to AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. Finally, we need to install the necessary dependencies —

composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3 "^3.0" --with-all-dependencies

Now, we can use the Storage class to upload and retrieve files to and from S3.

Now, let’s look at how we can upload a file to S3 and retrieve it as well. It’s important to note that while submitting a form with files, we must make sure that the enctype of the form is set to multipart/form-data. Failing to mention this wouldn’t allow the request object to access the file. The code snippet shown below can be used as a reference on how to access the file using the request object and uploading the same to S3.

// get the file using the file input's name
$file = $request->file('upload');

// store the file to S3 bucket's upload folder
// this would return the file path, e.g. uploads/filename.ext
$s3Path = $file->store('uploads', 's3');

// this value needs to be used to view the file within the application
$filename = basename($s3Path);

After uploading a file, if we go to the S3 console, we can see the the file being uploaded to the uploads folder. However, we try to open the file URL in the browser, we can see a Access Denied XML. If you recall, while creating the new S3 bucket, we’ve used the default setting. And the default settings blocks public access to the S3 bucket and its contents. This is for security purposes and so we’ll keep it as it is. The Laravel Storage class provides an easy way to view the uploaded files within our application. Firstly, we need to implement a GET /uploads/{filename} route so that our uploads can be viewed using this route. The controller for this route can be like —

public function uploads(String $filename) {
  return Storage::disk('s3')->get('uploads/' . $filename);
}

Finally, if we go to /uploads/{filename} by passing the value of the $filename variable, we can see our uploaded file. So, with just a few lines of code, a file upload functionality is ready to be used in a Laravel application.

— @bhargawanan_b