---
title: "Media"
description: "Effortlessly manage and serve all your media files."
tags: ["documentation"]
---

**bknd** provides a flexible and efficient way to handle media files, making it easy to upload, manage, and deliver content across various platforms.

### **Core Features**

- **File Uploads**: Supports direct (chunked coming soon) uploads of files up to 5GB (depending
  on your environment).
- **Adapter-Based Design**:
  - Pre-built support for S3, S3-compatible services (e.g., R2, Tigris), and Cloudinary.
  - Extend functionality by implementing custom adapters.
- **Entity Integration**: Attach media files directly to entities for seamless data association.
- **Content Delivery**: Serve media over an API endpoint or directly from your provider.

The media tools are designed to integrate effortlessly into your workflows, offering scalability
and control without added complexity.

### Pre-built support for S3

There are two ways to enable S3 or S3 compatible storage in bknd.

1. Enable via the admin UI.

   Simply navigate to the **Media** tab of the bknd admin UI and enable the S3 media support.
   Enter your AWS S3-compatible storage Access Key, Secret Access Key, and URL.
   This will automatically configure the S3 adapter for you.

   **URL Format Examples:**

   - **S3**: `https://{bucket}.s3.{region}.amazonaws.com`
   - **R2 (Cloudflare)**: `https://{account_id}.r2.cloudflarestorage.com/{bucket}`

2. Enable programmatically.

   To enable using a code-first approach, create an [Initial Structure](/usage/database#initial-structure) using the `initialConfig` option in your `bknd.config.ts` file.

```typescript title="bknd.config.ts"
import type { BkndConfig } from "bknd/adapter";

export default {
  initialConfig: {
    media: {
      enabled: true,
      adapter: {
        type: "s3",
        config: {
          access_key: "<key>",
          secret_access_key: "<secret key>",
          url: "<bucket url>",
        },
      },
    },
  },
} satisfies BkndConfig;
```

### Local adapter for development

For local development and testing, you can use the local file system adapter. This is particularly useful when working with Node.js environments.

```typescript title="bknd.config.ts"
import { registerLocalMediaAdapter } from "bknd/adapter/node";
import type { BkndConfig } from "bknd/adapter";

// Register the local media adapter
const local = registerLocalMediaAdapter();

export default {
  initialConfig: {
    media: {
      enabled: true,
      adapter: local({
        path: "./public/uploads", // Files will be stored in this directory
      }),
    },
  },
} satisfies BkndConfig;
```

This configuration will store uploaded files in the specified directory,
making them accessible through your application's public path (in this case)
or at `/api/media/file/{filename}`.
