Custom-File-Systems.md

#Custom file systems (IFileSystem)

By default, Umbraco uses an instance of PhysicalFileSystem to handle the media archive. The configuration for this can be found in /config/FileSystemProviders.config.

<Provider alias="media" type="Umbraco.Core.IO.PhysicalFileSystem, Umbraco.Core">
    <Parameters>
        <add key="virtualRoot" value="~/media/" />
    </Parameters>
</Provider>

PhysicalFileSystem implements the IFileSystem interface, and it is possible to replace it with a custom class - eg. if you want your media files stored on Azure or something similar.

If you configure Umbraco to use a custom file system provider for media, you most likely won't need to access the implementation directly. Umbraco uses a wrapper class called MediaFileSystem. You can get a reference to this wrapper class with the following code:

MediaFileSystem media = FileSystemProviderManager.Current.GetFileSystemProvider<MediaFileSystem>();

This will be enough in most cases and is the way Umbraco will access the file system provider. The wrapper class implements the same interface IFileSystem as any custom providers should do, so you will be able to call the same methods.

If your custom file system provider has some extra logic that you need to access, you can of course get a reference to the actual instance of IFileSystem. This can be archieved through the following code:

IFileSystem fs = FileSystemProviderManager.Current.GetUnderlyingFileSystemProvider("media");

Or alternately something like:

CustomFileSystem fs = FileSystemProviderManager.Current.GetUnderlyingFileSystemProvider("media") as CustomFileSystem;

if (fs != null) {
    // Do some stuff here
}

Both IFileSystem and FileSystemProviderManager are located in the Umbraco.Core.IO namespace.

Custom providers

Azure Blob Storage Provider by James, Dirk and Jeavon