Server

File Storage

Updated: September 26, 2024

Concept

Nuxeo stores binaries attached to the documents on a file system by default. That can be a shared file system, a NAS, an Amazon S3 bucket or its Microsoft Azure equivalent, etc. More options are available depending on your target deployment. This is described in the Storage Alternatives section below.

Recommendation

File Sharing

The shared filesystem is usually an NFS mount. You must not share the whole Nuxeo installation tree (see below).

The complete Nuxeo instance hierarchy must not be shared between all instances. However the following things must be shared:

  • All the binary stores must be shared by all Nuxeo instances in order for the document repository and transient stores to function correctly.
  • The temporary directory configured through nuxeo.tmp.dir must not be shared by all instances, because there are still a few name collision issues that may occur, especially during startup.

Storage Recommendation

You can store your binaries on a local storage (like a NAS). However, we recommend to use the Amazon S3 Online Storage with S3 Direct Upload whenever possible, with Client-Side Encryption.

Configuration

Binaries

In addition to the default repository binary store used for documents, Nuxeo uses dynamically-named binary stores for the various transient stores it needs. These dynamic binary stores are created as siblings of the default one.

The default repository.binary.store is $NUXEO/nxserver/data/binaries and therefore by default Nuxeo would create:

  • $NUXEO/nxserver/data/binaries
  • $NUXEO/nxserver/data/binaries_transient_authorizationRequestStore
  • $NUXEO/nxserver/data/binaries_transient_BatchManagerCache
  • $NUXEO/nxserver/data/binaries_transient_default
  • etc.

However the rest of the $NUXEO/nxserver/data directory must not be shared by several Nuxeo instances, as it contains instance-specific data.

Therefore in a cluster setting you should point repository.binary.store to a folder like /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries/binaries and mount/share /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries. This way the default binary store and all the dynamic binary stores will be created under the mount point:

  • /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries/binaries
  • /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries/binaries_transient_authorizationRequestStore
  • /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries/binaries_transient_BatchManagerCache
  • /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries/binaries_transient_default
  • etc.

You can of course use a different path than /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries. The above does not apply if binaries are stored in a network-based location, like S3.

Temporary Directory

In order for various no-copy optimizations to be effective, the temporary directory should be on the same filesystem as the binaries directory. To do this, the recommended way is to have each instance's nuxeo.tmp.dir point to a different subdirectory of the shared filesystem.

Using the above suggestions for the binaries directory, you could set nuxeo.tmp.dir to /var/lib/nuxeo/binaries/tmp/node1 for example, for a node with id node1.