Using a few lines of PHP to programmatically upload an image to Cloudinary

I recently re-wrote Ale House Rock using 11ty to generate the list and individual pages for beer and breweries.

I wanted to host the images on a CDN, specifically one that could process and optimise images. Sponsorship slots have worked as I immediately reached for Cloudinary. Their free tier was more than enough for my requirements so I set about integrating into my processes.

I was expecting to spend the whole evening on this requirement, however it seems Cloudinary has an absolute kick-ass PHP SDK which, if you are using composer made it fairly straightforward to implement.

Install the SDK

Installing the SDK with composer requires one command:

composer require cloudinary/cloudinary_php

Include the Classes

Add the following to the top of your PHP file

use Cloudinary\Configuration\Configuration;
use Cloudinary\Api\Upload\UploadApi;

Initialise the SDK

I had a class set up, so in my __construct() function, I used the following:

$this->cloudinary = Configuration::instance();
$this->cloudinary->cloud->cloudName = $config['cloudName'];
$this->cloudinary->cloud->apiKey = $config['apiKey'];
$this->cloudinary->cloud->apiSecret = $config['apiSecret'];
$this->cloudinary->url->secure = true;

The cloudName, apiKey and apiSecret are all located at the top of the Cloudinary dashboard after you login.

Upload an Image

From there, uploading an image involves calling their Upload class. I already had the image on my server and passed the path - Cloudinary did the rest.

I wanted it in a custom folder in my Cloudinary account, using the public_id parameter I was able to do this

(new UploadApi())->upload('path/to/image.jpg', [
	'public_id' => 'custom_path/and/folder.jpg'
]);

I was amazed at how little code was required to upload to Cloudinary - they've done a stirling job reducing the friction. Previous experience with trying to get an image anywhere was hell!

Will definitely be reaching for Cloudinary in the future.