Provide a behavior for writing uploaded chunks to a final destination.

By default, uploads are written to a temporary file on the server and consumed by the LiveView by reading the temporary file or copying it to durable location. Some usecases require custom handling of the uploaded chunks, such as streaming a user's upload to another server. In these cases, we don't want the chunks to be written to disk since we only need to forward them on.

Note: Upload writers run inside the channel uploader process, so any blocking work will block the channel errors will crash the channel process.

Custom implementations of Phoenix.LiveView.UploadWriter can be passed to allow_upload/3. To initialize the writer with options, define a 3-arity function that returns a tuple of {writer, writer_opts}. For example imagine an upload writer that logs the chunk sizes and tracks the total bytes sent by the client:

socket
|> allow_upload(:avatar,
  accept: :any,
  writer: fn _name, _entry, _socket -> {EchoWriter, level: :debug} end
)

And such an EchoWriter could look like this:

defmodule EchoWriter do
  @behaviour Phoenix.LiveView.UploadWriter

  require Logger

  @impl true
  def init(opts) do
    {:ok, %{total: 0, level: Keyword.fetch!(opts, :level)}}
  end

  @impl true
  def meta(state), do: %{level: state.level}

  @impl true
  def write_chunk(data, state) do
    size = byte_size(data)
    Logger.log(state.level, "received chunk of #{size} bytes")
    {:ok, %{state | total: state.total + size}}
  end

  @impl true
  def close(state, reason) do
    Logger.log(state.level, "closing upload after #{state.total} bytes}, #{inspect(reason)}")
    {:ok, state}
  end
end

When the LiveView consumes the uploaded entry, it will receive the %{level: ...} returned from the meta callback. This allows the writer to keep state as it handles chunks to be later relayed to the LiveView when consumed.

Close reasons

The close/2 callback is called when the upload is complete or cancelled. The following values can be passed:

• :done - The client sent all expected chunks and the upload is awaiting consumption
• :cancel - The upload was canceled, either by the server or the client navigating away.
• {:error, reason} - The upload was canceled due to an error returned from write_chunk/2. For example, if If write_chunk/2 returns {:error, :enoent, state}, the upload will be cancelled and close/2 will be called with the reason {:error, :enoent}.