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Deterministic Programming (V1)

Deterministic programming is a great way to approach handling filesystems in PHP. Deterministic means that given a certain input you’ll always get the same output. When we apply this approach to handling filesystems we’re able to mitigate many of the things that make filesystem handling problematic.

Filesystems are slow.

In general, filesystem interaction is slow. Every operation that hits the disk in one way or another is slow. While some operations absolutely require filesystem interaction, there’s a number of cases where filesystem operations can be prevented in order to eliminate the associated penalties.

Caching metadata.

Whenever we store files uploaded by the user it’s good to immediately store any associated metadata with them if you’ll need to use that later on. By storing the metadata we’ve limited the expense of the filesystem call to a single time. All subsequent calls can use the cached value. This is particularly effective because most files don’t change after they’re uploaded.

Deterministic file locations.

File storage organization can be a tricky thing. Much like “naming things” this task often isn’t as trivial as it may seem. Creating a naming scheme for your files can help a lot. For example:

/users/profile_pictures/{user_id}_{size}.png
/blog/posts/{post_id}_header.png
/blog/posts/{post_id}_preview.png

Once you’ve got the pattern, you can formalize this in a class:

<?php

class FilePathGenerator
{
    public function userProfilePicture($userId, $size): string
    {
        return "/users/profile_pictures/{$userId}_{$size}.png";
    }
}

The generated path can be used as the storage, but it can also be used as a deterministic lookup mechanism. Instead of guessing where a file might be, you’ll now know for sure.

By doing this you’ll prevent searches for files and limit it to a single file_exists check if you need to be sure the file exists. For Flysystem this would be a $filesystem->has($path); call.

Storing all file locations.

In order to get rid of almost all the penalties caused by filesystems you can store all the paths in a persistent database. While this is not a conventional thing to do it certainly has a lot of benefits.

File listings are just a select statement: SELECT * FROM files WHERE path LIKE '/prefix/%'. Listings can easily be sorted. File existence checks are inexpensive. File migrations become really easy, even when your path generation strategy changes. Metadata can be stored alongside your path.