S3 Asset Paths

Hey! Flysystem is now talking to S3! We know this because we can see the article_image directory and all the files inside of it. But when we went back to the homepage and refreshed, nothing worked!

Check out the image src URL: this is definitely wrong, because this now needs to point to S3 directly. But! Things get even more interesting if you go back to the S3 page and refresh. We have a media/ directory! And if you dig, there are the thumbnails! Woh!

This means that this thumbnail request did successfully get processed by a Symfony route and controller and it did correctly grab the source file from S3, thumbnail it and write it back to S3. That's freaking cool! And it worked because we already made LiipImagineBundle play nicely with Flysystem. We told the "loader" to use Flysystem - that's the thing that downloads the source image when it needs to thumbnail it - and the resolver to use Flysystem, which is the thing that actually saves the final image.

Correcting our Base URL

So if our system is working so awesomely... why don't the images show up? It's because of the hostname in front of the images: it's pointing at our local server, but it should be pointing at S3.

Click any of the images on S3. Here it is: every object in S3 has its own, public URL. Well actually, every object has a URL, but whether or not anyone can access that URL is another story. More on that later. I'm going to copy the very beginning of that, and then go open services.yaml. Earlier, we created a parameter called uploads_base_url. LiipImagineBundle uses this to prefix every URL that it renders. The current value includes 127.0.0.1:8000 because that's our SITE_BASE_URL environment variable value. That worked fine when things were stored locally... but not anymore!

Change this to https://s3.amazonaws.com/ and then our bucket name, which is already available as an environment variable: %env()%, then go copy AWS_S3_ACCESS_BUCKET, and paste.

This is our new base URL. What about the uploads_dir_name parameter? We're not using that at all anymore! Trash it.

Ok, let's try it! Refresh and... it actually works! I mean... of course, it works!

Correcting the Absolute URLs

There's one other path we need to fix: the absolute path to uploaded assets that are not thumbnailed. Open up src/Service/UploaderHelper.php and find the getPublicPath() method... there it is. This is a super-handy method: it allows us to get the full, public path to any uploaded file. This $publicAssetBaseUrl property... if you look on top, it comes from an argument called $uploadedAssetsBaseUrl. And in services.yaml, that is bound to the uploads_base_url parameter... that we just set!

There are a few layers, but it means that, in UploaderHelper the $publicAssetBaseUrl property is now the long S3 URL, which is perfect!

Head back to down getPublicPath(). Even before we changed uploads_base_url to point to S3, we were already setting it to the absolute URL to our domain... which means that this method already had a subtle bug!

Check it out: the original purpose of this code was to use $this->requestStackContext->getBasePath() to "correct" our paths in case our site was deployed under a sub-directory of a domain - like https://space.org/thespacebar. In that case, getBasePath() would equal thespacebar and would automatically prefix all of our URLs.

But ever since we started including the full domain in $publicAssetBaseUrl, this would create a broken URL! We could remove this. Or, to make it still work if $publicAssetsBaseUrl happens to not include the domain, above this, set $fullPath = , copy the path part, replace that with $fullPath, and paste.

Then, if strpos($fullPath, '://') !== false, we know that $fullpath is already absolute. In that case, return it! That's what our code is doing. But if it's not absolute, we can keep prefixing the sub-directory.

Hey! The files are uploading to S3 and our public paths are pointing to the new URLs perfectly. Next, we can simplify! Remember how we have one public filesystem and one private filesystem? With S3, we only need one.