Load Remote Assets On-Demand from another ProcessWire Instance

Problem

You are working on a local, remote or any other copy of your live site and only have the basic files without any assets (normally saved in /site/assets/files/) - but you maybe need some of the files. This hook does this for you. In case any of your pages, either frontend or backend, need a linked file it will download a copy to your very instance of your project.

Solution

Place this in your /site/ready.php, change the domain.tld entry to your real live instance and you are already done with this enormous timesaver. Keep in mind that this only handles ProcessWire-instances and nothing like Processwire-2-Joomla or ProcessWire-2-WordPress matchings.

$wire->addHookAfter('Pagefile::url, Pagefile::filename', function($event) {

  $config = $event->wire('config');
  $file = $event->return;

  if($event->method == 'url') {
    // convert url to disk path
    $file = $config->paths->root . substr($file, strlen($config->urls->root));
  }

  if(!file_exists($file)) {
    // download file from source if it doesn't exist here
    $src = 'https://domain.tld/site/assets/files/';
    $url = str_replace($config->paths->files, $src, $file);
    $http = new WireHttp();
    $http->download($url, $file);
  }
});

Resources

• https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.137/#on-demand-mirroring-of-remote-web-server-files-to-your-dev-environment