Can't access files in /tmp on Laravel

[eblaauw]

I'm setting up Laravel on a Google App Engine standard instance In my config I set

APP_STORAGE: "/tmp"
VIEW_COMPILED_PATH: "/tmp"

But after doing this, Laravel 7 cannot access files in storage/app anymore. I am trying to install https://github.com/spatie/laravel-analytics and this requires a file: app/analytics/service-account-credentials.json

Is it not possible to store a file inside the storage folder and then access it? It does work locally without /tmp env variables.

[bshaffer]

The App Engine environment is a read-only filesystem, with the exception of /tmp. The /tmp directory is not shared across App Engine instances, so should only be used for caching and other (as implied) temporary storage.

The APP_STORAGE environment variable is set to /tmp to prevent Laravel from writing to a read-only filesystem with functions such as the following (taken from Laravel's official documentation):

Storage::disk('local')->put('file.txt', 'Contents');

Permanent resources should be in a different directory. For the laravel-analytics plugin you've mentioned, the credentials can be configured for a different location:

// config/analytics.php

return [
    //...
    'service_account_credentials_json' => __DIR__ . '/analytics/service-account-credentials.json',
    //...
];

If this goes against Laravel conventions, we can recommend something other than setting APP_STORAGE to /tmp, but for this case, the above solution seems appropriate.

[eblaauw]

Looks OK to me. I can put the /analytics/service-account-credentials.json in a gitignore. Will try it out coming week, thanks!