FlyDrive

FlyDrive is a file storage library for Node.js. It provides a unified API to interact with the local file system and cloud storage solutions like S3, R2, and GCS.

The primary goal of Drive is to read and write user-uploaded files without vendor lock-in on a single provider. For example, during development, you may store files on your local file system and in production, you may switch to S3.

Switching between the drivers is a simple configuration change. You do not have to modify your application's core logic.

Official drivers

Following is the list of officially maintained drivers.

S3Driver - The S3 driver can be used with AWS S3, Cloudflare R2 and the Digital Ocean Spaces.
GCSDriver - The GCS driver is used to manage files on Google Cloud Storage.
FSDriver - The FS driver keeps files on the local filesystem and uses the Node.js fs module under the hood.

Why not Drive?

Drive serves a narrow use case, i.e., managing user-uploaded files with a unified API for all supported storage providers.

The constraints of a unified API prevent us from using the proprietary features of a specific vendor. For example:

Drive cannot be used to create symlinks. While the local file system allows symlinks, cloud providers do not support this concept.
You cannot watch the filesystem or assign Unix-style permissions to a file because cloud providers do not support this concept.
Directories are treated as second-grade citizens. Cloud providers like S3 and GCS have no concept of directories - they operate as key-value stores.

Why Drive?

Drive can be an excellent fit for applications that use cloud storage services to manage user-uploaded files. With Drive:

You get a unified API for various storage services, including S3, R2, Digital Ocean spaces, GCS, and your local file system.
Extensible API to add custom storage drivers.
Unified exception handling.
Baked-in security primitives to prevent common attacks like Path travesal.