Uppy is a sleek, modular JavaScript file uploader that integrates seamlessly with any application. It’s fast, has a comprehensible API and lets you worry about more important problems than building a file uploader.
Fetch files from local disk, remote URLs, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Instagram or snap and record selfies with a camera
Preview and edit metadata with a nice interface
Upload to the final destination, optionally process/encode
Lightweight, modular plugin-based architecture, light on dependencies ⚡
Resumable file uploads via the open tus standard, so large uploads survive network hiccups
Supports picking files from: Webcam, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Instagram, bypassing the user’s device where possible, syncing between servers directly via @uppy/companion
Works great with file encoding and processing backends, such as Transloadit, works great without (all you need is to roll your own Apache/Nginx/Node/FFmpeg/etc backend)
Sleek user interface ✨
Optional file recovery (after a browser crash) with Golden Retriever
Speaks several languages (i18n) 🌍
Built with accessibility in mind
Free for the world, forever (as in beer 🍺, pizza 🍕, and liberty 🗽)
Cute as a puppy, also accepts cat pictures 🐶
Installation
npm install @uppy/core @uppy/dashboard @uppy/tus
Add CSS uppy.min.css, either to your HTML page’s <head> or include in JS, if your bundler of choice supports it.
Alternatively, you can also use a pre-built bundle from Transloadit’s CDN: Edgly. In that case Uppy will attach itself to the global window.Uppy object.
⚠️ The bundle consists of most Uppy plugins, so this method is not recommended for production, as your users will have to download all plugins when you are likely using only a few.
If you’re using a bundler, you need to import them before Uppy:
import'core-js'import'whatwg-fetch'import'abortcontroller-polyfill/dist/polyfill-patch-fetch'// Order matters: AbortController needs fetch which needs Promise (provided by core-js).import'md-gum-polyfill'importResizeObserverfrom'resize-observer-polyfill'window.ResizeObserver??=ResizeObserverexport{default}from'@uppy/core'export*from'@uppy/core'
If you’re using Uppy from CDN, those polyfills are already included in the legacy
bundle, so no need to include anything additionally:
Having no JavaScript beats having a lot of it, so that’s a fair question! Running an uploading & encoding business for ten years though we found that in cases, the file input leaves some to be desired:
We received complaints about broken uploads and found that resumable uploads are important, especially for big files and to be inclusive towards people on poorer connections (we also launched tus.io to attack that problem). Uppy uploads can survive network outages and browser crashes or accidental navigate-aways.
Uppy supports editing meta information before uploading.
Uppy allows cropping images before uploading.
There’s the situation where people are using their mobile devices and want to upload on the go, but they have their picture on Instagram, files in Dropbox or a plain file URL from anywhere on the open web. Uppy allows to pick files from those and push it to the destination without downloading it to your mobile device first.
Accurate upload progress reporting is an issue on many platforms.
Some file validation — size, type, number of files — can be done on the client with Uppy.
Uppy integrates webcam support, in case your users want to upload a picture/video/audio that does not exist yet :)
A larger drag and drop surface can be pleasant to work with. Some people also like that you can control the styling, language, etc.
Uppy is aware of encoding backends. Often after an upload, the server needs to rotate, detect faces, optimize for iPad, or what have you. Uppy can track progress of this and report back to the user in different ways.
Sometimes you might want your uploads to happen while you continue to interact on the same single page.
Not all apps need all these features. An <input type="file"> is fine in many situations. But these were a few things that our customers hit / asked about enough to spark us to develop Uppy.
Why is all this goodness free?
Transloadit’s team is small and we have a shared ambition to make a living from open source. By giving away projects like tus.io and Uppy, we’re hoping to advance the state of the art, make life a tiny little bit better for everyone and in doing so have rewarding jobs and get some eyes on our commercial service: a content ingestion & processing platform.
Our thinking is that if only a fraction of our open source userbase can see the appeal of hosted versions straight from the source, that could already be enough to sustain our work. So far this is working out! We’re able to dedicate 80% of our time to open source and haven’t gone bankrupt yet. :D
Does Uppy support S3 uploads?
Yes, please check out the docs for more information.
Can I use Uppy with Rails/Node.js/Go/PHP?
Yes, whatever you want on the backend will work with @uppy/xhr-upload plugin, since it only does a POST or PUT request. Here’s a PHP backend example.
And you’ll need @uppy/companion if you’d like your users to be able to pick files from Instagram, Google Drive, Dropbox or via direct URLs (with more services coming).