DigitalOcean Spaces is an object storage service that can be used to store large amounts of diverse, unstructured data. WordPress sites, which often include image and video assets, can be good candidates for object storage solutions. Using object storage for these types of static resources can optimize site performance by freeing up space and resources on your servers. For more information about object storage and WordPress check out our tutorial on How To Back Up a WordPress Site to Spaces.
In this tutorial, we will use a WordPress plugin that works directly with DigitalOcean Spaces to use it as the primary asset store. The DigitalOcean Spaces Sync plugin routes the data of our WordPress media library to Spaces and provides you with various configuration options based on your needs, streamlining the process of using object storage with your WordPress instance.
This tutorial assumes that you have a WordPress instance on a server as well as a DigitalOcean Space. If you do not have this setup, you can complete the following:
With these prerequisites in place, we’re ready to begin using this plugin.
Throughout this tutorial, we will be working with the wp-content/uploads
folder in our WordPress project, so it is important that this folder exists and has the correct permissions. You can create it with the mkdir
command using the -p
flag to create the folder if it doesn’t exist, and avoid throwing an error if it does:
- sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
You can now set permissions on the folder. First, set the ownership to your user (we will use sammy here, but be sure to use your non-root sudo
user), and group ownership to the www-data
group:
- sudo chown -R sammy:www-data /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
Next, establish the permissions that will give the web server write access to this folder:
- sudo chmod -R g+w /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
We will now be able to use our plugins to create a store in object storage for the assets in the wp-content/uploads
folder and to engage with our assets from the WordPress interface.
The first step in using DigitalOcean Spaces Sync will be to install it in our WordPress folder. We can navigate to the plugin folder within our WordPress directory:
- cd /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins
From here, we can install DigitalOcean Spaces Sync using the wp
command:
- wp plugin install do-spaces-sync
To activate the plugin, we can run:
- wp plugin activate do-spaces-sync
From here, we can navigate to the Plugins tab on the left-hand side of our WordPress administrative dashboard:
We should see DigitalOcean Spaces Sync in our list of activated plugins:
To manage the settings for DigitalOcean Spaces Sync, we can navigate to our Settings tab, and select DigitalOcean Spaces Sync from the menu:
DigitalOcean Spaces Sync will now give us options to configure our asset storage:
The Connection Settings field in the top half of the screen asks for our Spaces Access Key and Secret. It will then ask for our Container, which will be the name of our Space and the Endpoint.
You can determine the endpoint of your Space based on its URL. For example, if the URL of your Space is https://example-name.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com
, then example-name
will be your bucket/container, and nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com
will be your endpoint.
In the plugin’s interface, the Endpoint section will be pre-filled with the default https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com
. You should modify this endpoint if your Space lives in another region.
Next, you will be asked for File & Path Settings. In the field marked Full URL-path to files, you can input either a storage public domain, if your files will be stored only on your Space, or a full URL path, if you will store them on your Space and server.
For example, if your WordPress project is located in /var/www/html
, and you want to store files on both your server and Space, then you would enter:
http://your_server_ip/wp-content/uploads
in the Full URL-path to files field/var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
in the Local path fieldThe Storage prefix and Filemask settings are prefilled and do not need to be modified unless you would like to specify certain types of files for your sync.
We will cover the specifics of storing files on your server and Space and your Space alone in the following sections.
DigitalOcean Spaces Sync offers the option of saving files to your server while also syncing them to your Space. This utility can be helpful if you need to keep files on your server, but would also like backups stored elsewhere. We will go through the process of syncing a file to our Space while keeping it on our server. For this example, we will assume that we have a file called sammy10x10.png
that we would like to store in our media library and our Space.
First, navigate to the Settings tab on your WordPress administrative dashboard, and select DigitalOcean Spaces Sync from the menu of presented options.
Next, in the Connections Settings field, enter your Spaces Key and Secret, followed by your Container and Endpoint. Remember, if the URL of your Space is https://example-name.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com
, then example-name
will be your Container, and nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com
will be your Endpoint. Test your connections by clicking the Check the Connection button at the bottom of the Connection Settings field:
Now we are ready to fill out the File & Path Settings.
In the Full URL-path to files field, we can enter our full URL path, since we are saving our file on our server and our Space. We will use our server’s IP here, but if you have a domain, you can swap out the IP address for your domain name. For more about registering domains with DigitalOcean, see our tutorial on How To Set Up a Host Name with DigitalOcean. In our case, the Full URL-path to files will be http://your_server_ip/wp-content/uploads
.
Next, we will fill out the Local path field with the local path to the uploads
directory: /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads
.
Because we are working with a single file, we do not need to modify the Storage prefix and Filemask sections. As your WordPress media library grows in size and variety, you can modify this setting to target individual file types using wildcards and extensions such as *.png
in the Filemask field.
Your final File & Path Settings will look like this:
Be sure to save your configuration changes by clicking the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.
Now we can add our file, sammy10x10.png
, to our WordPress media library. We will use the wp media import
command, which will import the file from our home directory to our WordPress media library. In this case, our home directory will belong to sammy, but in your case, this will be your non-root sudo
user. As we move the file, we will use the --path
parameter to specify the location of our WordPress project:
- wp media import --path=/var/www/html/ /home/sammy/sammy10x10.png
Looking at our WordPress interface, we should now see our file in our Media Library. We can navigate there by following the Media Library tab on the left side of our WordPress administrative dashboard:
If we navigate to our Spaces page in the DigitalOcean control panel, we should also see the file in our Space.
Finally, we can navigate to our wp-content/uploads
folder, where WordPress will have created a sub-folder with the year and month. Within this folder, we should see our sammy10x10.png
file.
The DigitalOcean Spaces Sync plugin has an additional option that will allow us to store files only on our Space, in case we would like to optimize space and resources on our server. We will work with another file, sammy-heart10x10.png
, and set our DigitalOcean Spaces Sync settings so that this file will be stored only on our Space.
First, let’s navigate back to the plugin’s main configuration page:
We can leave the Connection Settings information, but we will modify the File & Path Settings. First, in the Full URL-path to files, we will write the storage public domain. Again, we will use our server IP, but you can swap this out for a domain if you have one: http://uploads.your_server_ip
Next, we will navigate to Sync Settings, at the bottom of the page, and click the first box, which will allow us to “store files only in the cloud and delete after successful upload.” Your final File & Path Settings will look like this:
Be sure to save your changes by clicking the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.
Back on the command line, we will move sammy-heart10x10.png
from our user’s home directory to our Media Library using wp media import
:
- wp media import --path=/var/www/html/ /home/sammy/sammy-heart10x10.png
If we navigate back to our WordPress interface, we will not see sammy-heart10x10.png
or sammy10x10.png
in our Media Library. Next, if we return to the command line and navigate to our wp-content/uploads
directory, we should see that sammy-heart10x10.png
is missing from our timestamped sub-folder.
Finally, if we navigate to the Spaces page in the DigitalOcean control panel, we should see both files stored in our Space.
We have covered two different options you can use to store your WordPress media files in DigitalOcean Spaces using DigitalOcean Spaces Sync. This plugin offers additional options for customization, which you can learn more about by reading the developer’s article Sync your WordPress media with DigitalOcean Spaces.
If you would like more general information about working with Spaces, check out our introduction to DigitalOcean Spaces and our guide to best practices for performance on Spaces.
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To manually move old media to spaces, use:
Work like a charm: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/resources/s3cmd/
I notice that this doesn’t seem to sync all folders and files from the WP /uploads/ directory. Only the typical WP year/month directories for me are syncing to Spaces. However I need other directories and files within the WP /uploads/ to sync. Any idea how to make that happen using the DigitalOcean Spaces Sync Settings Plugin? Theme CSS and some other Plugin files often get put in this /uploads/ directory and don’t follow the same naming convention as base WP media files.
Does the plugin move existing media files to DO Spaces and rewrite the media URLs?
The plugin is not working in 2024. It is outdated and has no support at all. It’s a shame that DigitalOcean does not offer an official plugin for this specific need.
Please help My origin Endpoint is https://myendpoint.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com, i have a folder name “location” How can i set up my upload file go to exact Local path: https://myendpoint.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/location/2024
That plugin was out of update, and it does not work when checking the connection.
Set
Full URL-path to files:
tohttps://uploads.your_server_ip
will not work unless you manage the subdomain to the space, so if you do not set the subdomain, fill the field with this value:https://Bucket-Space-Name.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/
do not forget to replace
nyc3
with the region of the space, and removecdn
if you not enable it for the spaceThe command to install Digital Ocean Spaces Sync ('wp plugin install do-spaces-sync") failed. It couldn’t create the directory and ‘do-spaces-sync’ plugin could not be found.
I was, however, able to install the plugin from Wordpress
“…be sure to use your non-root sudo user”
I had no idea how to do this, but this article was helpful:
How To Create a New Sudo-enabled User on Ubuntu 18.04
I created a CDN and have everything connected and working as expected. The website has 1000’s of images and I was curious if it were possible to upload all them to spaces then sync them to wordpress. Is this possible?