Maintenance

There are various maintenance tasks which can be performed to maintain a healthy TYPO3 installation with the file abstraction layer.

Scheduler tasks

The typo3/cms-scheduler system extension provides two main tasks related to the file abstraction layer.

File abstraction layer: Update storage index

This task goes through a storage and makes sure that each file is properly indexed. If files are only manipulated via the TYPO3 backend, they are always indexed. However, if files are added by other means (for example, FTP), or if some storages are based on drivers accessing remote systems, it is essential to run this task regularly so that the TYPO3 installation knows about all the existing files and can make them available to users.

This task is defined per storage.

File abstraction layer: Extract metadata in storage

This task goes through all files in a storage and updates their metadata. Again, this is especially important when files can be manipulated by other means or actually reside on external systems.

This task is defined per storage.

Processed files

If you change some graphics-related settings, it may be necessary to force a regeneration of all processed files. This can be achieved by deleting all existing processed files in System > Maintenance > Remove Temporary Assets.

Here you can choose to delete all files in fileadmin/_processed_/

This cleanup is also a good idea if you have been accumulating files for a long time. Many of them may be obsolete.

Attention

If you delete processed files, you should flush the page cache immediately afterwards. If pages are cached and the page uses processed images, these will not be regenerated on the fly when a page is loaded. Ideally, make sure the removal of the processed files and flushing of page cache is one atomic operation which is performed as quickly as possible.

After flushing page cache, it is a good idea to warmup the page cache. Generating the pages for the first time may take longer than usual because the processed files need to be regenerated. There is currently no Core functionality to warmup the page cache for all pages, but there are a number of extensions which provide this functionality. Alternatively, one can use the sitemap and a tool such as wget for this.

Also, deleting processed files while editors are active is not ideal. Preferably, lock the TYPO3 backend before you remove the processed files.

Cleaning up processed files on the command line

The console command vendor/bin/typo3 cleanup:localprocessedfiles from system extension typo3/cms-lowlevel removes processed files that are no longer needed from local storage (Local driver rather than cloud storage). It deletes:

files in the processing folders that are not referred to by any sys_file_processedfile records, and
sys_file_processedfile records where the processed file no longer exists.

Show which files and records the command would delete, without deleting them:

vendor/bin/typo3 cleanup:localprocessedfiles --dry-run -v

typo3/sysext/core/bin/typo3 cleanup:localprocessedfiles --dry-run -v

The command asks for confirmation before deletion. Option -f (--force) skips confirmation, as does running the command without interaction, for example when running it as a scheduler task for regular cleanup.

Option --all deletes processed files in all storage and all the associated records, including those still in use. TYPO3 then recreates the processed files, which is useful, for example, if a new file processor has been added. Flush the page cache afterwards, as described above.