Tiny Storage

Tiny Storage is a minimal, DI-ready file/object storage abstraction that allows implementing a custom storage adapter within one hour.

What and Why?

My personal use case for Tiny Storage is small, self-hosted web services that currently need to store data on the file system. As usual for .NET developers, I wanted an abstraction, in this case for "object storage" because those services might store data at another location like Azure Blob Storage or similar in the future (spoiler: that won't happen, but hey...).

Tiny Storage is a minimal abstraction for storing files at an arbitrary location.

How Does It Work?

Tiny Storage's root interface is the StorageProvider. For example, to store files in a directory on your local file system, you can use the built-in DiskStorageProvider:

using TinyStorage;
using TinyStorage.Disk;

StorageProvider storageProvider = new DiskStorageProvider("/tmp/my-storage");

Given a StorageProvider, you can access StorageContainers (directories/folders) via two functions:

// RootContainer is the top-most container available.
StorageContainer rootContainer = storageProvider.RootContainer;
Console.WriteLine(rootContainer.Path); // <empty>

// Alternatively, get a specific container via a path:
StorageContainerPath path = new("some", "sub", "container");
StorageContainer container = storageProvider.GetContainer(path);
Console.WriteLine(container.Path); // some/sub/container

Both StorageContainerPath and the StorageContainer overload the / operator (C#) for convenient path building:

StorageContainerPath myPath = StorageContainerPath.Root / "some" / "sub" / "container";
Console.WriteLine(myPath); // some/sub/container

StorageContainer container = storageProvider.RootContainer / "some" / "sub" / "container";
Console.WriteLine(container.Path); // some/sub/container

// Or alternatively, use GetContainer:
StorageContainer container = storageProvider.GetContainer(root => root / "some" / "sub" / "container");
Console.WriteLine(container.Path); // some/sub/container

Once you have a StorageContainer instance, you can use it to manipulate files:

StorageContainer container = storageProvider.RootContainer;

await container.CreateIfNotExistsAsync();

bool containerExists = await container.ExistsAsync();
bool fileExists = await container.FileExistsAsync("file.txt");

IEnumerable<string> fileNames = await container.ListFilesAsync();
IEnumerable<string> subContainerNames = await container.ListContainersAsync();

using Stream readStream = await container.OpenReadAsync("r.txt");
using Stream writeStream = await container.OpenWriteAsync("w.txt", overwrite: true);

await container.DeleteFileAsync("file.txt");
await container.DeleteAsync();

Dependency Injection

Tiny Storage plays well with dependency injection. Simply register your StorageProvider of choice in your DI container:

// Using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection:
services.AddSingleton<StorageProvider>(new DiskStorageProvider("/tmp/my-storage"));

Then use the StorageProvider in your services:

public class MyService
{
    private readonly StorageProvider _storageProvider;

    public MyService(StorageProvider storageProvider)
    {
        _storageProvider = storageProvider;
    }

    public async Task CreateHelloWorldFile()
    {
        StorageContainer container = _storageProvider.RootContainer;
        await container.CreateIfNotExistsAsync();

        await using Stream writeStream = await container.OpenWriteAsync("hello.txt", overwrite: true);
        await using StreamWriter writer = new(writeStream);
        await writer.WriteLineAsync("Hello, World!");
    }
}

Implement a Custom StorageProvider

To support a custom storage provider, you need to inherit from two classes:

1. StorageContainer: Implement file operations for your storage solution.
2. StorageProvider: Instantiate your custom StorageContainer instances.

For a reference implementation, check out the two disk storage implementations:

• DiskStorageContainer
• DiskStorageProvider

Contributing

If you have any ideas, suggestions, fixes or improvements that you would like to see integrated into this project, feel free to open an issue or pull request!

License

See the LICENSE file for details.