Flownative.Flow.ResourceProxy

Description

This Flow package allows to transparently import resource data from other systems into Flow. It does this by providing an implementation that tries to fetch missing resources from a remote source. When a resource can be fetched, it is "imported" and available as usual, otherwise the system behaves as usual when a resource is missing.

Because Neos CMS is using Flow's resource management under the hood, this also works nicely for assets in Neos.

This is mostly useful for local development, as it removes the need to copy all resources to the lcoal machine along with a database dump.

Installation

The Flownative Resource Proxy is installed as a regular Flow package via Composer. For your existing project, simply include flownative/flow-resourceproxy into the dependencies of your Flow or Neos distribution:

composer require flownative/flow-resourceproxy

Configuration

To import, the package needs to know the base URI of the remote source and whether or not it uses subdivided hash path segments.

Flownative:
  Flow:
    ResourceProxy:
      storages:
        # the default storage for a Flow setup
        'defaultPersistentResourcesStorage':
          # the remote base URI to the published resources
          remoteSourceBaseUri: 'https://www.acme.com/_Resources/Persistent'
          # whether or not the remote source uses the target setting of the same name
          subdivideHashPathSegment: true

After setting up the configuration, clear the Fusion cache to make sure the URIs will be fetched again and can be checked for needing an import. Similarly, clearing the existing thumbnails will force the system to re-generate them.

Troubleshooting

If things don't work as expected, check the system log, the package is pretty talkative in the debug log level.

Implementation

In Flow, resource access is handled through the resource management API. These mehods would need to check for a missing resource and try to fetch it if not available locally:

• StorageInterface.getStreamByResource
• StorageInterface.getStreamByResourcePath (unused in a plain Neos setup)
• TargetInterface.getPublicPersistentResourceUri

The following are covered by the above methods:

• Collection.getStreamByResource via StorageInterface.getStreamByResource
• ResourceManager.getStreamByResource via Collection.getStreamByResource
• ResourceManager.getPublicPersistentResourceUri via TargetInterface.getPublicPersistentResourceUri
• ResourceManager.getPublicPersistentResourceUriByHash via TargetInterface.getPublicPersistentResourceUri

On top of that the system uses image variants and thumbnails, assuming those exist if their metadata can be found in the database. Still, the URI for those is fetched using the TargetInterface.getPublicPersistentResourceUri method.

This package thus advises the StorageInterface and TargetInterface to check for missing resources and tries to "import" them as needed.

Note: So far this only works for the WritableFileSystemStorage.