Steps to do a file upload in Laravel Vapor

Since Laravel Vapor is serverless you cannot store files directly in the filesystem. All files should be stored in a cloud storage system, such as AWS S3. You can use the Vapor application to store the file in AWS S3 by adding the storage key as the S3 bucket name to the environment’s vapor.yml configuration.

id: 3958 name: vapor-example environments: Production: storage: vapor-blog build: - 'composer install --no-dev' - 'php artisan event:cache' - 'npm ci && npm run prod && rm -rf node_modules' deploy: - 'php artisan migrate --force'

On deploying if the bucket doesn’t exist in S3, Vapor will create a new bucket and configure it.

File Uploads

For file uploads, the Vapor documentation says to use the Vapor’s NPM package includes a Vapor.store helper. I tried to use the Vapor.store helper package but was having trouble to use this package. My console was giving an error like the Vapor command not found. I spend many hours fixing this but was unsuccessful. So we looked for alternative approaches.

Let’s see how I implemented a CSV file upload and convert it to an array in Vapor.

First I added these two routes to the route.php file

Route::get('/upload', function () { return view('upload'); }); Route::post('/upload', 'UploadController@store');

The upload view form part in the upload.blade.php file is given below

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> {{csrf_field()}} <div class="form-group"> <label for="exampleInputFile">File input</label> <input type="file" id="exampleInputFile" name="input_file"> Upload CSV File. </div> <button type="submit" class="btn btn-default">Submit</button> </form>

Now let’s look at the all-important upload Controller that we will describe.

Here is the store method in the UploadController.php

/** * Stores the file and convert to array * @param Request $request * @return dumped data */ public function store(Request $request) { $fileName = date("m-d-y-H-i-s") . '.csv'; $path = $request->file('input_file')->storeAs('uploads', $fileName); $items = $this->processCsv($path); dd($items); }

The first 2 lines in-store method creates a unique random file name and stores the files in the uploads folder of the S3 bucket with the generated file name. This is the only code needed to upload the file in the S3 bucket. When the code is deployed with the storage key as the bucket name, Vapor configures the default file driver as S3. So when the storeAs method is used the file automatically gets placed in the S3 bucket.

Note:

But when you try in your local file system the file only gets placed in the storage directory since the local file system may have the default driver as ‘local’. You can configure your ‘.env’ file with the AWS configurations and default filesystem as S3 if you want to place the file in the S3 bucket from local.

Now let’s look at how to process the CSV file that we stored in the S3 bucket in the processCsv function.

/** * Process Csv File and convert to an array * @param string $path * @return array */ public function processCsv(string $path) { if (!Storage::exists($path)) { return false; } $csvFile = Storage::get($path); $csvData = $this->convertCsvToArray($csvFile); return $csvData; }

This function checks if the file exists in the file system then gets the file contents and passes it to the ‘convertCsvToArray’ function which is defined below.

/** * Convert csv data to array * @param string $csvFile * @param string|null $header * @param array $data * @return array */ public function convertCsvToArray(string $csvFile, string $header = null, array $data = []) { $csvData = str_getcsv($csvFile, "\n"); foreach ($csvData as $row) { $row = str_getcsv($row, ","); if (!$header) { $header = $row; continue; } $data[] = array_combine($header, $row); } return $data; }

The function uses ‘str_getcsv’ PHP function which parse a CSV string into an array. I have previously used ‘fgetcsv’ PHP function which gets the line from file pointer and parse for CSV fields. But ‘fgetcsv’ cannot be used here since it requires ‘fopen’ to open the file from the local file system which will not exist when Vapor is used.

First, the ‘str_getcsv’ function parses the CSV string using line breaks and converts to an array with array elements as CSV rows. Then it loops each row and parse the string to the array as columns. The function then combines the header and row making it an associative array with key as header and value as the column value.
The output array will look like the following

array:6 [ 0 => array:6 [ "Serial #" => "11122203" "Asset Tag #" => "" "Hardware Standard" => "" "Tech Spec" => "2.4GHz/5GHz" "Current Status" => "test "Date Modified" => "08/16/2019" ] 1 => array:6 [ "Serial #" => "SERHPT12345" "Asset Tag #" => "" "Hardware Standard" => "Lenovo - Lenovo Tab 4.8+" "Tech Spec" => "A1395 / 32GB / Wi-Fi" "Current Status" => "test" "Date Modified" => "08/19/2019" ] 2 => array:6 [>] 3 => array:6 [>] 4 => array:6 [>] 5 => array:6 [>] ]

You can then parse the array to a database for further processing.
The whole UploadController.php will look like the following

<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers; use Illuminate\Http\Request; use Storage; class UploadController extends Controller { /** * Stores the file and convert to array * @param Request $request * @return dumped data */ public function store(Request $request) { $fileName = date("m-d-y-H-i-s") . '.csv'; $path = $request->file('input_file')->storeAs('uploads', $fileName); $items = $this->processCsv($path); dd($items); } /** * Process Csv File and convert to an array * @param string $path * @return array */ public function processCsv(string $path) { if (!Storage::exists($path)) { return false; } $csvFile = Storage::get($path); $csvData = $this->convertCsvToArray($csvFile); return $csvData; } /** * Convert csv data to array * @param string $csvFile * @param string|null $header * @param array $data * @return array */ public function convertCsvToArray(string $csvFile, string $header = null, array $data = []) { $csvData = str_getcsv($csvFile, "\n"); foreach ($csvData as $row) { $row = str_getcsv($row, ","); if (!$header) { $header = $row; continue; } $data[] = array_combine($header, $row); } return $data; } } }

Originally published at https://www.2hatslogic.com on November 14, 2019.