Skip to content
ToftToft

Admin guideApps and the estate

The artifact store

Where built releases are published so they outlive the machine — S3, Azure Blob or a local directory.

View as Markdown

By default a release is a directory under APPS_DIR. An artifact store publishes it somewhere durable, so a restart can rehydrate it. Unset, releases stay local and nothing in the UI suggests otherwise.

When you need one

Section titled “When you need one”
  • The host’s disk does not survive replacement — a container, an autoscaled instance, an ECS task.
  • You run isolated mode. A workload in a cluster cannot read APPS_DIR, so the store is required.

Configuration

Section titled “Configuration”

ARTIFACT_STORE names a backend: s3, azblob or local. Any other value is refused at startup. There is no CLOUD variable.

Terminal window
# S3 or S3-compatible
ARTIFACT_STORE=s3
ARTIFACT_BUCKET=toft-releases
ARTIFACT_REGION=eu-west-1
ARTIFACT_ENDPOINT=          # MinIO or a self-hosted server only
ARTIFACT_S3_PATH_STYLE=1    # MinIO and most compatible servers
ARTIFACT_PREFIX=releases/   # when the bucket is shared


# Azure Blob — ARTIFACT_BUCKET is the container; ARTIFACT_ACCOUNT is required
ARTIFACT_STORE=azblob
ARTIFACT_BUCKET=toft-releases
ARTIFACT_ACCOUNT=toftartifacts


# A local directory you trust
ARTIFACT_STORE=local
ARTIFACT_DIR=/var/lib/toft/artifacts

Credentials come from the ambient chain — an EC2 instance role, an ECS task role, AKS workload identity, an Azure managed identity. The one exception is ARTIFACT_CONNECTION_STRING, for the Azurite emulator.

Not the apps’ object store

Section titled “Not the apps’ object store”
Holds Configured by
Artifact store Toft’s built releases ARTIFACT_*
App storage Apps’ own files STORE_* and a storage resource

STORE_BACKEND is never derived from ARTIFACT_STORE.