friendica-object-storage

Add-on for Friendica to use S3 object storage.

Installation

• Copy the objectstorage folder to the addon folder of your Friendica installation.
• In the objectstorage/addon folder, run composer install --no-dev.
• In Friendica, as an administrator, activate the add-on.
• On the storage selection page Configuration > storage, select ObjectStorage and fill in the settings.
  • In your Amazon AWS S3 or compatible service you define a new empty bucket with a globally unique name and enter that name here.
  • The bucket permissions should be set to not allow public access, but by your account only.
  • When Friendica runs on AWS EC2, create an IAM policy with access for GetObject, PutObject and DeleteObject to this bucket only and add this policy to an EC2 instance role, then set that EC2 instance role on your instance.
  • When Friendica doesn't run on AWS EC2, define credentials with bucket access and set these in the ~/.aws/credentials file or in environment variables.
• Click Save and Use storage backend.
• Optionally look at Configuration > Site > Performance > Cache contact avatars and decide whether you want these remote contact avatars included in your storage.

Status

This is work-in-progress.

• Only tested very minimally against Amazon AWS S3.
• No CDN can be configured.
• No by-pass or redirect on the reverse proxy is possible, i.e. the media are always loaded by Friendica from the bucket instead of redirecting the user's browser to the bucket.

Note that the Friendica project itself now provides and S3 storage add-on. It is preferred over this one. The differences are:

• It uses a third party library instead of Amazon's library
• It requires you to enter your login credentials, while this plugin doesn't even allow you to enter them