How to retrieve files from S3 in Laravel Vapor

Question

I'm having a problem loading images in my html dynamically after storing them successfully with Laravel Vapor.

I have followed this documentation provided by laravel vapor to store files, and it works like a charm. I copy my uploaded files from the tmp directory into the root of my S3 bucket and then store the path of that file in my databases images table so that later I can return the file path to my front end and display the image in my browser.

Unfortunately this is always returning a 403 status code from AWS S3.

I could fix this by making my generated S3 bucket public, but that would raise a security issue. I believe this should work out of the box, not sure where I could have gone wrong... any ideas?

I am returning the uploaded image url using the Storage facade.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Storage;    

return Storage::url($image->path);

Where $image->path is the file path in my S3 bucket.

I'm sure that the storage facade is working correctly because it is returning the correct url with the file's path.

Answer 1

I got the solution to this problem. I contacted laravel vapor support and I was told to set the visibility property for my file to public when I copy it to the permanent location, as stated in Laravel's official documentation here.

So after you upload your file using the js vapor.store method you should copy it to a permanent directory, then set it's visibility to public.

Storage::copy($request->path, str_replace('tmp/', '', $request->path));
Storage::setVisibility(str_replace('tmp/', '', $request->path), 'public');

I also noticed that your can set the visibility of the file directly in the vapor.store method by passing a visibility attribute with the respective value.

vapor.store(file, { visibility: 'public-read' });

As a side note: just 'public' will return a 400 bad request, it must be set to 'public-read'.