Unless you are doing something specific never write directly to the document store (its not as db as you know it) for one thing is not the best-structured store owing to the fact they support multiple.
As @Giggiux says use the abstraction layer this allows your plugin to work with both mongo and redis and it also allows NodeBB to change the structure of the doc store or even add more and your plugin will just work.
@Jenkler That's what I will probably end up doing I already have deployment scripts I was just hoping someone else had done it and could save me some work 
@jiangcaiyang ./nodebb upgrade updated the dependencies, but that is not my issue the issue is updating the core files and merging my package.json with nodebbs.
I maintain a git repo for our forum that contains our NodeBB install along with ops scripts, package.json with our required plugins, readme files, etc.
The issue i have is when we go to upgrade its a very manual process of removing the old files, downloading the new files, only pasting over the ones we need and merging the package.json.
I'm sure i'm not the only one doing this and am interested if anyone has come up with a decent solution? or script to automate it a bit more? that i could base my own off.
I am super busy at the moment with other work if anyone has found any bugs with the plugin or is willing to look at the outstanding issues on GitHub pull requests would be hugely appreciated.
The plugin itself could do with a total rewrite really as it has been added onto and patched up by so many people over the years. I seem to be the 3rd maintainer I can tell. Which I may get round to if I can put some time aside, this would also help solve some of the longstanding issues with file deletion etc along with adding tests something that is sorely lacking.
Also thanks to @julian and everyone else who has submitted PR's while I have been maintaining the plugin.
Hi guys with the release of discords proper API this plugin needs a rewrite if anyone wants to work on it with me message me on GitHub.
Hi guys if you have issues with my plugins do not post here! make an issue on Github.
Also the git repo for this has changed location but npm is still the same.
https://github.com/LouiseMcMahon/nodebb-plugin-s3-uploads
I will be looking into the issues with 1.1 today.
I tesed it a few days ago its not. Your better off using an smtp plugin and SES's smtp options. I may look at forking and fixing it at some point.
If you want the quick and dirty you can change it to port 80 in your config.json if you do and your hosting on linux your likely going to need to run it via sudo.
I have pushed out several bug fixes and an update to the admin area today for this plugin i have also taken a look at the remove unused images functionality and as far as i can tell its not going to be possible without risking removing images of other plugins or some custom db querys.
My original plan was just to search through all posts and users grab any profile pics and cover images along with files from posts and then remove any thing that is in the s3 bucket that is not in that list. But if someone added a plugin that added images somewhere else that would remove them. the other option is to search through the DB for any occurrences of the s3 bucket and get the file id from that but i dont believe that's possible with the current NodeBB functionality.
So the only option left would be to write custom query's for both mongo and redis and interface directly with the db. That's something im not entirely sure plugin should be doing and im not even sure that's possible with redis.
As for the individual path per user i dont think that would add any benefit to the plugin as everything has a unique id.
@accalia i need to do processing on them server side as part of the s3 uploads plugin
is their a way to get all posts ive managed to get all users via search but having no luck with posts.
@frissdiegurke im new to node in general is their not something in express or node have something similar to PHP's $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']?
Im currently using the bellow but it seems that .url is not verry reliable as even if the user dosent set it correctly the site just works anyway. Does Nodebb have a function somewhere i cant find?
var siteConfig = module.parent.require('../config.json');
siteConfig.url
@Arc right now not a lot the eventual plan is to expose hooks so that you can build your own plugins on it to create commands such as @bot link last killmaill.
Along with add more functionality like be able to say in discord @bot upvote that or @bot repply to last post "thats awesome how did you do it" and it would post or up vote using your nodebb account.
A bot for discord that integrates with NodeBB and gives notifications of new posts.
Their are 2 hooks you can use to build plugins on top of this for custom commands
I plan to add more functionality such as users being able to add their discord usernames to nodebb up voting and replying to posts from discord.
Ah that makes sense thanks
In the docs their is an example
var MyPlugin = { myMethod: function(postData, callback) { var req = cls.get('http').req; // current http request object. var res = cls.get('http').res; // current http response object. var uid = req.user.uid; // current user id // ... }, ...
but it never says how to determine what MyPlugin should be for your plugin? can you use anything? or is it declared somewhere im missing?