Image Storage With AWS S3

Amazon S3 is one of the easiest and most standard storage services out there. We use S3 at Fiction, and we recommend it for storing images in your Factor application.

The S3 Plugin

Factor has a plugin designed to enable S3 for image storage: S3 plugin. The first step is to install it.

npm add  @factor/plugin-storage-s3

This plugin will handle everything for you once installed. However you still need to provide it working S3 credentials.

Create an AWS Account

If you don't have one already, create an account at AWS and visit your console.

Create a Storage Bucket

S3 has the idea of buckets, essentially folders for storing static files. You'll need to create a bucket for use with Factor and get its unique name.

In AWS console go to S3 > Create Bucket.

Then, enable public access as images are statically hosted and publicly accessible.

Get Access Key / Secret

Next you'll need to get your AWS access key and secret for a privileged user.

Go to AWS Console > IAM > Users.

Then create a user.

And then create an access key. Make sure to get the key and secret for use in .env.

Add to .env

Once you've done that, you should also have a AWS_ACCESS_KEY, an AWS_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET and the name of your bucket AWS_S3_BUCKET.

In your .env it will look like this.

# .env / AWS config info
AWS_ACCESS_KEY="KEY"
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET="SECRET"
AWS_S3_BUCKET="your-bucket-name"