ExpressionEngine’s filesystem layer was refactored in version 7 to make use of the popular Flysystem library. Flysystem is a mature and stable filesystem abstraction library that allows us to easily create more adapters and integrate with a diverse set of filesystems. This is where Cloud Files comes in, it is a free first-party (built by Packet Tide, the developers of ExpressionEngine) Add-on that enables the use of cloud filesystems from several popular providers.

At the time of this writing Cloud Files can help you store your files with Amazon S3, Digital Ocean Spaces and CloudFlare R2 with more options on the way.

Cloud storage solutions provide a number of benefits including redundancy, virtually unlimited space, edge caching through CDNs and even more so it’s natural to ask why isn’t this included in ExpressionEngine?

The current Amazon AWS SDK is over 30MB which would more than double the size of ExpressionEngine. And while storage space may not be an issue for everyone we always aim to keep our resource footprint as small as possible. So we decided to offer this set of features as an optional first party Add-on that you can download and install for free if it meets your needs.

Cloud Files is open source and we welcome user contributions and feedback to our Github repository.

Check out the documentation to get started with Cloud Files today!