Configuring Minio for Local Dev with Seamless Payload Cloud S3 Integration

[pale crag]

Hey everyone! I'm working on a PayloadCMS project and need some advice on setting up file storage. For local development, I want to use a Minio S3 instance to handle uploads, but when deploying to Payload Cloud, I’d like it to switch seamlessly to the S3 storage provided by the platform.

My goal is to configure payload.config.js and environment variables so that it works with Minio locally (using access/secret keys and a custom endpoint) and then uses Payload Cloud’s S3 (with Cognito auth, I assume?) in production without breaking anything. Has anyone set this up before? What’s the best way to handle the conditional logic for switching between the two environments? Any tips or examples would be super helpful! Thanks!

[old lantern]

New Community-Help Thread Created!

Help is on the way! To mark it as solved, use the /solve command. In the meantime, here are some existing threads that may help you:

Documentation:

• Production Deployment - File storage - Persistent vs Ephemeral Filesystems
• Migrations - When to run migrations - Postgres
• Production Deployment - File storage - Using cloud storage providers
• Storage Adapters - Collection-specific options
• Cookie Strategy - CSRF Prevention - Cross domain authentication - 2. Configure cookies

[granite sluice]

All plugins have an enabled switch.

Here one my configs. (I do not use a storage provider in dev)

  s3Storage({
    enabled: process.env.S3_ENABLED === 'true',
    collections: {
      media: true,

You could use a STORAGE_PROVIDER variable to switch between your providers.

[pale crag]

Very helpful, thank you!

While examining templates and code examples in other repositories, I couldn’t find any instances of working with the S3 storage from Payload Cloud or its specific configurations. Does this mean that for local development, it’s sufficient to have the @payloadcms/payload-cloud plugin connected, which will use the local file system as storage, and then, when deployed to production in Payload Cloud, a storage solution will be automatically set up to store all media files? Initially, I assumed I’d need to set up a local S3 instance and manage the storage connection through variables in Payload Cloud.

[granite sluice]

PayloadCMS falls back to local storage. https://payloadcms.com/docs/upload/storage-adapters

I have not used Payload Cloud, yet.
But setup should not be different from others.