The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial today from Lukas White showing you how to work with abstract file systems that aren't local. In this case, the file system is virtual and living on a remote system.

Reading and writing files is an integral aspect of any programming language, but the underlying implementation can vary enormously. For example, the finer details of writing data to the local filesystem compared to uploading over FTP is very different – yet conceptually, it’s very similar. In addition to old warhorses like FTP, online storage is increasingly ubiquitous and inexpensive – with scores of services available such as Dropbox, Amazon’s S3 and Rackspace’s Cloud Files – but these all use subtly different methods for reading and writing. That’s where flysystem comes in.

He shows how to install the flysystem library (via Composer) and a few examples showing how to make connections to:

• an Amazon S3 instance
• a Dropbox account
• SFTP
• even Memcache

Examples of both reading and writing to this virtual system are also included as well as a few other features like handling visibility, listing files/directories and mounting the remote filesystem locally.