Storage

Note

Only relevant for on-premise users.

As a SaaS customer of Zammad, you don’t have access to these settings. We’re handling these for you to ensure service stability.

Here you can define where Zammad stores attachments for tickets and the knowledge base. By default, Zammad writes to the Database - you can switch to Filesystem or Simple Storage (S3) at any time. In this case, please have a look on the following instructions.

If you have a busy Zammad instance, we strongly encourage you to use filesystem storage instead of database. This improves the system performance (decreases database load and and size).

Database

This is the default storage method. The attachments are stored directly in the database. If your Zammad instance grows, we recommend one of the other methods to maintain performance.

Filesystem

This storage method is recommended for all Zammad instances, especially for those with a higher load. If you choose filesystem, your files are written to /opt/zammad/storage/.

Moving attachments from Database to Filesystem can be run during production use. However, you should consider your framework conditions (e.g. bandwidth, system load in production) to define the right moment.

Note

You noticed slow updates of Zammad?

While Zammad is being updated, it enforces a recursive “change owner” (chown) for this directory. For instances with many files this can be time consuming. To mitigate that, you can move your files and create a symlink in /opt/zammad/storage/ to the new directory. Of course you have to make sure that the permissions are always correct.

Simple Storage (S3)

To use the Simple Storage (S3), you have to provide some settings, which can’t be accessed in the UI (see instructions below).

The prerequisite is to have access to a S3-compatible storage and to have all necessary parameters available (which depends on your storage provider; if in doubt, please ask there for help).

Steps to configure S3:

  1. Copy config/zammad/storage.yml.dist to config/zammad/storage.yml

  2. Edit the copied file in one of the following ways:

  • Either provide your S3 configuration with one attribute per line like in the upper area of the file

  • Or provide your S3 configuration as an URL (which you can find at the end of the file). Note: you can also provide this URL as environment variable (see system documentation) without using this yml-file.

  • We recommend the deletion of the not used configuration style to avoid inconsistencies.

  1. Restart Zammad so the config file / environment variable is loaded

  2. Set the “Storage Method” in Zammad to Simple Storage (S3) in Settings > System > Storage and click on “Submit”. After that, Zammad checks your configuration and the connection to the service and will raise an error message if something is wrong.

A very simple storage configuration could look like this:

s3:
   access_key_id: 'xxxxxxxx'
   secret_access_key: 'yyyyyyy'
   region: 's3-us-west-2'
   endpoint: 'https://zammad.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com'
   bucket: 'zammad'

Hint

If you use a different provider than AWS (e.g. Backblaze) and you observe issues, try to add the request_checksum_calculation and response_checksum_validation parameters as you can see in the example below:

s3:
   access_key_id: 'xxxxxxxx'
   secret_access_key: 'yyyyyyy'
   region: 'us-west-004'
   endpoint: 's3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com'
   bucket: 'zammad'
   request_checksum_calculation: when_required
   response_checksum_validation: when_required

Tip

Before setting the storage method to Simple Storage (S3) (step 4), please make sure to have a working setup.

You can verify this by running rails r 'Rails.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT); pp Store::Provider::S3.ping?' in your Zammad directory. If everything is fine, you should see true, else you should see false and a simple error message.

If you installed Zammad through a package manager (rather than from source), replace rails r with zammad run rails r above. To learn more, see Administration via Console.