Local disk

Files on the machine the app is running on, the way Laravel’s local disk works. Next.js only — a Worker has no filesystem to write to.

npx flare create shop --storage disk

There is nothing to get

No account, no card, no credentials. That is the whole appeal:

STORAGE_DRIVER=disk
# STORAGE_DIR=storage/app      # the default

Flare needs	Where it comes from
STORAGE_DIR	You choose it. Defaults to storage/app, relative to the app

Where the files land

storage/app/
├─ objects/        ← the bytes, under the key the app chose
└─ meta/           ← one small file per object, holding its content type

The sidecar in meta/ is why a file called IMG_0421 with no extension still comes back as an image rather than a download — the type is recorded at upload instead of guessed at read.

Add it to .gitignore:

storage/

A new app from flare create --storage disk already has that line. If you switched to disk later, add it yourself — the first thing somebody uploads should not end up in a commit.

Two places it does not belong

Anything that scales horizontally. Two instances do not share a filesystem, so the second one serves 404s for everything the first one wrote. There is no warning for this at runtime; it just looks like files going missing at random.

Anything serverless — Vercel, Lambda, Workers — where the filesystem is read-only and whatever you do write does not outlive the request. Deployed to Vercel, this driver raises an error saying so, rather than failing an upload for no stated reason.

Where it does

Developing without Docker. The default r2 driver points at MinIO from the compose file; disk needs neither.

One server you own. A VPS or a single container, where a mounted volume is simpler than a bucket and you would rather not add a third party. Back the volume up, because nothing else is holding those files.

Reads stay private

A read URL is a short-lived signed token that app/api/storage/route.ts redeems, so whoever issued it decided the viewer was allowed it. The files are never served straight off the filesystem, which is also why nothing under storage/ needs to be inside public/.

Moving off it later

One line, plus that provider’s credentials:

STORAGE_DRIVER=r2

Files already on disk stay on disk — switching decides where the next upload goes, not where the old ones live. To move them, copy storage/app/objects/ into the new bucket under the same keys and the existing records keep resolving.