Laravel: Making storage work on App Engine

Question

I followed the Getting started with Laravel on PHP for App Engine and I'm getting an error when I change the path of the Storage to Google Cloud Storage in local development.

ex.

const BUCKET_NAME = "bucket-name";
$storage_path = "gs://" . BUCKET_NAME . "/storage";

Here is the ErrorException:

file_put_contents(/meta/services.json): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Answer 1

App Engine doesn't allow you to write to the local filesystem for security and scalability reasons. Fortunately though you can read and write to Google Cloud Storage easily using commands like file_put_contents(). This facility is also emulated in the local dev_appserver.

Take a look at https://github.com/ajessup/laravel for a version of Laravel that's been tweaked to run well on Google App Engine, including writing /meta/services.json to GCS.