Local development

You can develop and test your integration without the production service: run the File Service locally, point your backend at it, and switch back by configuration. This guide is for backend developers who have access to the service’s repository. Nothing in your code changes between the two.

Run the service locally

The service’s repository has a setup guide that starts it on your machine in a development mode: an in-memory directory of tenants, applications and users instead of the Identity Server, development tokens you create from the command line, local storage instead of the real store, and processing that runs immediately. Follow that guide; it lists the fixture’s tenant, application, user and client ids.

The development mode cannot be switched on in staging or production: the service refuses to start with it.

Point your backend at it

Value	Production	Local
Files API URL	https://files.centralcodestation.com/api/v1	http://localhost:50600/api/v1
Resource identifier	https://files.centralcodestation.com/api	http://localhost:50600/api
Tokens	From the Identity Server	Development tokens printed by the service’s tooling, accepted only by a locally running service

A service in development mode accepts development tokens only, not tokens of a real Identity Server. With curl or a generated client, send the development token as the bearer token. The Node client asks <issuerUrl>/oauth/token for its token: give it a fetch option that answers that one request with a development token ({ "access_token": "…", "expires_in": 3600 }) and passes every other request through.

What behaves the same, and what does not

Same as production	Different locally
Every route, body, answer and error code	Ticket URLs point at the local service instead of the store
method: put and multipart, part sizes, ETags, completion	Processing runs right after completion, in the same process
Permissions, visibility, share links, quotas, the audit log	No events reach the Notification Service
Images get their renditions	Video posters need the media tools installed on your machine

So the same upload code (single PUT and multipart) runs against both. A web app on another local port can PUT to the local ticket URLs.

Caution

Never point production configuration at a local service, and never use a development token outside your machine. They are unsigned and only a service in development mode accepts them.