How to cache S3 stored pictures to local disk and serving them from your web server
Apr 23, 2017
The problem
Recently I worked on upgrading a legacy Laravel v4.2 to a newer version of Laravel. The site stored user uploaded pictures, which where stored locally on the app's public folder.
Now, I didn't like the fact that those pictures where stored locally because if the server went down the picture files would go down as well. Therefore deploying to a new server would require the hassle of manually restoring the pictures from a backup.
I was thinking to upload all images to S3 and serve them from there, but on the other hand I didn't want to get additionally charged from AWS S3 for the pictures bandwidth.
How could I get a local cache of those pictures? Here is the solution that worked for my case.