The File Explorer application has the following features

• Display all files and folders in the current folder
• Store a new file or create a folder
• Filter the entire view by folder

The design pattern for the File-Exploder app is the flat fileystem while keeping the meta data for files and folders in database.

One of the benefits of using a flat filesystem is that it can improve the speed of file search and retrieval. Since there are no subdirectories, the file system doesn't need to traverse multiple levels of directories to find the required file.

This can reduce the time it takes to access files and improve application performance, particularly when working with large numbers of files.

The following steps are recommended in order to run app on local env

Clone the repositrory

git clone https://github.com/naumcei/file-explorer

Copy .env file

cp .env.example env

Change hosts file

127.0.0.1 file-explorer.local

Build docker images

dokcer compose up --build
docker exec -it file_explorer_app /bin/bash

Container CLI

composer install

Generation of files and folders can be completed using Artisan command

php artisan file-explorer:install

The above command will show the following prompt

Example: Seeding database with the following

• 1 root folder
• 5000 nested folders
• 1 000 000 files

Console prompts ->

Please enter the number of root folder: 1
Please enter the number of folder: 5000
Please enter the number of files: 1000000
Do you want to proceed? (yes/no): yes

The above command will populate the database and will generate files in a filesystem on the following location

storage/app/public/tmp/faker0k2Njw.log

Note: The followind command will reset the database and filesystem php artisan file-explorer:reset

Create Root Folder - create root folder

php artisan db:seed --class='FolderSeeder'

Create folder - create folder

php artisan db:seed --class='FolderSeeder'

Create file - create file

php artisan db:seed --class='FileSeeder'

On the following route the is a list of generated folders https://file-explorer.local:39001/

Display Directory structure

• There is an action preview that present the folder structure

Display all files and folders in the current folder

Filter the entire view by folder

php artisan test

The above command will execute the following tests

Unit Tests

• test_it_can_create_a_root_folder
• test_it_can_create_a_folder
• test_it_can_create_a_file

Integration Tests

• test_if_file_exists_on_file_system
• test_if_file_has_content
• test_if_folder_has_files_in_db_and_in_file_system

Unit test screenshoot

Database is storing the metadata for each file and folder, including the folder name, file name, the directory it belongs to, and the path to the file on the filesystem

Note: The index type FULL_TEXT will speed up the search by name on both tables folders and files

ALTER TABLE files ADD FULLTEXT search_file_name_index (name);

ALTER TABLE folders ADD FULLTEXT search_folder_name_index(name);

All files that are generated are stored in the following location

storage/app/public/tmp/

This approach allows you to take advantage of the benefits of a flat filesystem, such as faster file search and retrieval, while still being able to maintain a logical directory structure for the files and folders thanks to the metadata that is stored to database

• Laravel Version: 10.0.3
• PHP Version: 8.23
• Composer Version: 2.5.4

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