CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsimageherokupaperclip
varatis
varatis

Reputation: 14740

How can I handle user-uploaded photo files for a Rails app (using paperclip) on Heroku?

So I'm making a Rails app which allows Users to create Items, and each Item has an image attachment, which is handled through the Paperclip gem. The Paperclip gem, by default, saves photos to the public folder, both in original (and thumbnail) form.

I can see how this can get out of hand pretty fast in terms of storage space, given that photos can be fairly big.

My questions:

1) How much space will Heroku allow me to hold for images in the public folder?

2) If Heroku only allows you to hold a finite amount of data in this folder (which I'm sure it does), how can I handle photo storage for a site that will probably have a lot of images? Remotely perhaps? Compression? (Specifics would be nice, as I am completely new to image storage.)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1793

Answers (2)

Simpleton
Simpleton

Reputation: 6415

As Chris said, you'll want to use a third party service like S3 and if you do end up using Paperclip then you'll eventually have something like this example in your model.

has_attached_file :photo,
        :styles => { :thumb=> "100x100", :small  => "300x300" },
        :storage => :s3,
        :s3_credentials => "#{Rails.root.to_s}/config/s3.yml",
        :path => "/:id/:style/:filename"

And in your config directory you'll have an s3.yml credentials file that would look like:

development:
   bucket: blahblah
   access_key_id: sfoi40j8elkfv08hwo
   secret_access_key: DJyWuRtsfoi40j8elkfv08hwos0m8qt

production:
   bucket: blahblah
   access_key_id: sfoi40j8elkfv08hwo
   secret_access_key: DJyWusfoi40j8elkfv08hwos0m8qt

Upvotes: 0

Chris Ledet
Chris Ledet

Reputation: 11628

Heroku has a read-only file system for your app. Use Amazon S3 to store your uploaded images. Paperclip has great support for S3. Check out this Heroku guide.

Upvotes: 3

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