Google Compute Engine - PHP upload files to bucket

0
votes

I created a Google Cloud Platform account, deployed the LAMP server, and logged in through SFTP and uploaded my existing site.

My site is currently running on another server, so I also uploaded all my databases and everything.

On my current server with hostgator I upload files to the /home/username/public_html/uploads folder, but on google you can upload to buckets. I figured I would use their Cloud Storage instead.

I tried doing a PHP move_uploaded_file() to the bucket: gs://mybucket/uploads; however, that's not working.

What's the trick? The only documentation I can find is using the App Engine, but I'm just using the Compute Engine with LAMP installed.

Also, which would be better? Should I stick with saving the uploads to the LAMP server, or should I use buckets?

Thanks!

2
phpgoogle-cloud-storagegoogle-compute-engine
Regarding your issue with move_uploaded_file() from PHP: that sounds like a separate question from whether to use VM's local disk or GCS. Please open a separate question and provide the input (more complete code sample, if possible) and as much of the error output as you can share (removing private details, of course). - Misha Brukman

2 Answers

1
votes

You could use the json api directly: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/how-tos/upload

There is also a PHP library for using the Google APIs in general: https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/php/start/get_started

Then you could use that library to insert objects into your bucket with a call like this: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/objects/insert

0
votes

If you're already running a LAMP stack, it's fine to serve files directly from the VM itself, using its local disk; you don't need to start using Google Cloud Storage for typical, simple use cases.

Google Cloud Storage, which is where the buckets terminology comes from, is useful for storing lots of files, or for serving a very large site, either for processing via Hadoop or for serving to a global audience. Because this involves more work on your part, this makes sense if your site is so popular that the cost of serving data directly from the VM is more expensive than using Google Cloud Storage.

However, Google Cloud Storage has much higher scalability than disks on a VM (though you can attach additional disks, you're limited to having up to 10TB of persistent disk per VM, and it's not an automatic process), but that depends whether your use case will need that much space.

Bottom line: if your site is working fine with the LAMP stack on your VM, it's fine to keep it. It's a good idea to keep track of your TCO so keep an eye on the cost of your compute, storage, and network traffic, and see at which point it may make sense to move some of your assets to Google Cloud Storage.

You can use Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator to estimate your costs, but also take a look at pricing for Google Compute Engine (which includes compute, storage, and networking) as well as Google Cloud Storage, and see how your particular use case will work out.