How to use a Ceph (or S3) bucket for WordPress uploads

using-ceph-or-s3-bucket-for-wp-uploads.md

How to use a Ceph (or S3) bucket for WordPress uploads

Listed below are the steps I took to use Ceph object store for WordPress media without a plugin. It works by mounting Ceph (or an AWS S3) bucket as a network device on the file system via s3fs and using wp-content/uploads/ as the mount path.

Since s3fs is POSIX compatible, it means you can still access (and manage) the media within wp-content/uploads/ over SFTP/SSH as if they are natively there.

WP-CLI commands such as wp media import and wp media regenerate also still work.

Although your media is being stored and fetched from a network storage bucket, your web server can still resolve all the requests to wp-content/uploads/ on the local filesystem like normal.

This means that image URLs do not have to be rewritten and will use the core format you're used to over HTTP https://mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/cat.jpg and any absolute filesystem paths in PHP that may exist /path/to/wp-content/uploads/cat.jpg.

Things To Know

1. I used a standard WordPress 4.7.3 install on an Ubuntu 16.04.2 VPS running Apache 2.4.18 and PHP 7.1.3.
2. Using a s3fs mount isn't super fast. I noticed the most blantant lag when uploading image(s) to the Media Library. I had to wait what seemed like 60 seconds just for the thumbnail preview of one image to appear.
3. goofys is said to be 2-10x faster, but I haven't tried it (yet). It has less POSIX support.

Setup

1. Install the s3fs program:

sudo apt-get install s3fs

2. Save default credentials:

sudo echo MYACCESSKEY:MYSECRETKEY > /etc/passwd-s3fs
sudo chmod 600 /etc/passwd-s3fs

3. Uncomment the user_allow_other config in fuse.conf:

sudo vi /etc/fuse.conf

4. Add a config to /etc/fstab so your bucket will be mounted on boot:

sudo vi /etc/fstab

• Change the bucketname, uploads path, and url option to fit your setup
• For S3 buckets, remove the use_path_request_style and url options
• The uid and gid options are used to set the ownership of wp-content/uploads/ once it's mounted. Set these to match your $APACHE_RUN_USER and $APACHE_RUN_GROUP envvars, respectively.

s3fs#bucketname    /path/to/wp-content/uploads    fuse    _netdev,allow_other,use_path_request_style,no_check_certificate,mp_umask=022,uid=www-data,gid=www-data,url=https://storage.api.hostname.com    0    0

5. Make sure wp-content/uploads/ is empty

rm -Rf /path/to/wp-content/uploads && mkdir /path/to/wp-content/uploads

6. Mount all file systems that are defined in /etc/fstab:

sudo mount -a

Other

List all file system mounts:

sudo df -h

Unmount the bucket from the file system:

sudo umount s3fs

I'm using S3Fs in production for 2 years. Its very stable. you can pass a local cache to s3fs. This will improve read a lot! The only problem with this aproach, do not owerwrite files , the cache versions will not update ad s3fs do not provide any way to invalidate cache.