VIP File System
On the VIP Platform, media files that are uploaded to a WordPress site are not stored in a filesystem that is local to the web container. Instead, an API is used to store the uploaded files in a separate read-only service called the VIP File System. The VIP File System is an external, globally distributed object store.
All of the contents of a WordPress site’s /wp-content/uploads/
directory are mapped to the VIP File System. This design provides better security, allows VIP’s CDN to more easily scale access to a site’s media, and enables the WordPress application to automatically horizontally scale more efficiently across multiple hosts.
The VIP File System provides high performance access to media files associated with a WordPress site. When browsers request these files, they are served through a dedicated system using the same domain as the site, with a long time to live (TTL). Some third-party performance scans may not recognize VIP’s CDN due to content being served from the same domain as the site hosted on VIP.
- All common operations, including uploads, cropping, editing, and deleting, work as expected through the WordPress Admin dashboard.
- The File System provides dynamic image resizing and image transformation.
- Separate files are not created for intermediate images. Instead, the intermediate size of an image is dynamically generated at the time of a request.
- Media files can be imported to the File System with VIP-CLI, and a site’s or environment’s media files can be exported from the VIP Dashboard.
- Media files uploaded or imported to a WordPress production environment are automatically shared with the associated non-production environments. When a data sync from a production environment to a non-production environment is completed, the target environment loads the shared media files automatically.
- By default, files on the VIP File System are cached by NGINX with a
Cache-Control
HTTP header set tocache-control: max-age=31536000
(1 year). This cannot be modified. - Cached content for media files can be purged by resource URL in the VIP Dashboard or with the VIP-CLI command
vip cache purge-url
.
Last updated: November 16, 2023