Assets

Assets are used to store files such as images, videos, PDFs, etc. Assets can be assigned to products, variants and collections by default. By using custom fields it is possible to assign assets to other entities. For example, for implementing customer profile images.

The handling of assets in Vendure is implemented in a modular way, allowing you full control over the way assets are stored, named, imported and previewed.

1. An asset is created by uploading an image. Internally the createAssets mutation will be executed.
2. The AssetNamingStrategy is used to generate file names for the source image and the preview. This is useful for normalizing file names as well as handling name conflicts.
3. The AssetPreviewStrategy generates a preview image of the asset. For images, this typically involves creating a version with constraints on the maximum dimensions. It could also be used to e.g. generate a preview image for uploaded PDF files, videos or other non-image assets (such functionality would require a custom AssetPreviewStrategy to be defined).
4. The source file as well as the preview image are then passed to the AssetStorageStrategy which stores the files to some form of storage. This could be the local disk or an object store such as AWS S3 or Minio.
5. When an asset is later read, e.g. when a customer views a product detail page which includes an image of the product, the AssetStorageStrategy can be used to read the file from the storage location.

AssetServerPlugin

Vendure comes with the AssetServerPlugin pre-installed, which provides ready-made strategies for asset handling, a powerful image transformation API (resize, crop, format conversion via query parameters), and support for custom storage backends such as AWS S3 or Minio.

Asset Tags

Assets can be tagged. A Tag is a simple text label that can be applied to an asset. An asset can have multiple tags or none. Tags are useful for organizing assets, since assets are otherwise organized as a flat list with no concept of a directory structure.