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Set up file storage

Mattermost requires a file storage system for storing user files, images, and attachments. Choose one of the following before you install, because moving between them later means migrating existing files:

  • S3-compatible object storage (recommended)
  • Network file storage
  • Local file storage

For guidance on how much storage to provision, see backing storage benchmarks.

For production environments, we recommend using S3-compatible object storage such as:

  • Amazon S3
  • Digital Ocean Spaces
  • Other S3-compatible services

When using S3 storage, you'll need:

  1. A bucket created specifically for Mattermost
  2. Access credentials (Access Key and Secret Key)
  3. Appropriate bucket policies configured
  4. The following information for configuration:
    • Bucket name
    • Region (if applicable)
    • Access Key
    • Secret Key
    • Endpoint URL (for non-AWS S3 services)

You configure these values in System Console > Environment > File Storage. See the file storage configuration settings documentation for details.

Network file storage​

For production environments that cannot use S3-compatible object storage, we recommend using a Network Addressable Storage (NAS) solution with Network File System (NFS).

You'll need to prepare an NFS server with a dedicated share for Mattermost (e.g. /mnt/mattermost_data) and mount it on all servers that will be running Mattermost.

Local file storage​

For simple deployments, you can use local file storage. However, we don't recommend this for production environments or multi-node deployments, because the files aren't shared between application servers and aren't covered by a separate backup target.

  1. Create a directory for file storage:

    sudo mkdir -p /opt/mattermost/data

  2. Set appropriate permissions:

    sudo chown -R mattermost:mattermost /opt/mattermost/data

Next steps​