In my seeds, I usually use Cloudinary and Active Storage by attaching new pictures to my object:
file = URI.open("https://my_image_location")
model_instance.photo.attach(io: file, filename: "file_name")
Problem is: each time we run the seed, a new upload of the image is done by Active Storage, and my Cloudinary account is filled with duplicate images.
I want to fix this problem by storing my images on Cloudinary, and making Active Storage use it directly without duplicating it, but I have no clue how to do that. (I was able to back in the days I was using CarrierWave, so it's a little frustrating :/)
Do you have any idea how to do that?
Thanks for your time!
Public id generation is handled by Active Storage, and thus you cannot choose the public id. This is one of the limitations of an Active Storage flow.
Since this is only for testing, you may be able to delete all the images from the database after your testing is done with a few commands in the rails shell.
Related
I'm making a demo for a ruby gem I created that process images and I have my application for the demo using the gem. I want the demo to allow the user to upload an image and try the demo but I don't really want to store the image in a database.
I read about redis but I'm not sure if is the right solution since I don't think is intended to be used with images.
maybe you could simply ask the user to upload an image address as a string rather than a file?
Storing in Redis is not a bad idea, you could also set an expiry date to delete keys older than x days / hours. But keep in mind that Redis is still a database which you need to maintain.
Another approach is to just store it on the filesystem and delete the oldest file before storing a new one so you only store the latest x files.
http://qnimate.com/storing-binary-data-in-redis/
maybe you could simply ask the user to upload an image address as a string rather than a file?
I like this approach by Hassan, you could ask the user to upload to Dropbox / Google files for instance. Or ask to enter the email address and use Gravatar. This would be a light weight approach so if it's just an example I would go for this.
A mobile iOS team wants an endpoint that they can send a username, a user ranking, and either an image related to that user or an array of images if the user has a gif or animation related to them. Then they will ping that endpoint in order to render these images on another page in their mobile app.
I decided to build this in Rails as a prototype. At first I thought I would need S3 in order to store the images, but now I'm not so sure. Can't I use the built-in database within my Rails app, since my Rails app won't be rendering any of the images? What are the advantages of using S3 in this case? Is S3 necessary?
For prototyping purposes, no, S3 isn't needed. You can store the images locally in the filesystem or even in DB, though, I'd say you should start with Postgres right away, because it has an array type you can use for the images table.
However, if you are making this an actual feature of a product, yes, consider S3 very seriously. Actually, something else you might want to look into is CloudFront, because it'll allow you to build a CDN and fetching images will be faster on the user side. Locality is significant portion of a fast UI, especially if images are a big part of it.
This question already has answers here:
Storing Images in DB - Yea or Nay?
(56 answers)
Closed 10 years ago.
in my website, user can upload a profile image.
I wanted to know what is the best way to store those images.
my thought is simply dedicated directory. the image name will be the user_id.
is that a good solution, or there's a smarter one?
You have two options, store the images or use an external source (gravatar).
If you're going to store the images, do you want these images to be publically available or are they private? If they are publically available, then you can store them in your public folder.
You can use something like carrierwave to handle the uploading, versioning and storing of the images.
For public stuff, I'll store the file in the public directory under the uploader/model name/field name/id location. This is more for organizational purposes on my part.
Check out http://railscasts.com/episodes/253-carrierwave-file-uploads for a good tutorial.
For private images, I'll set the store directory to something outside of the public folder and will create a download action within the controller with the file. This way, the user cannot download the file unless it goes through the controller action. With authorization (cancan) I can allow or disallow a user to access the download action for that particular file (hence making it somewhat secure). If you are going to be using a production server like apache or nginx, make sure that you set the appropriate handlers for sending the file (ie x_sendfile).
Its very common to store images in a directory for small applications. However there are a few of things to take into consideration here:
Do you have anticipate a lot of users? If you have a million users, storing everyone's photo in your directory will take up a lot of memory when running your application
Are you deploying on Heroku? Many RoR apps are, and if you deploy on Heroku it will destroy any files you store locally when your app is moved to a different dyno (and you generally have no way of predicting when this will happen). You can read about the Ephemeral filesystem here https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#isolation-and-security
In general I would advise against storing all your images locally because rewriting the code as you scale will become painful. I recommend you upload to an Amazon S3 Bucket and download the images as you need (and cache them for when your user is logged in). Its helpful becasue you might have to deal with image processing (for example resizing the images that are uploaded, creating thumbnail versions of the uploaded images) and its easier to do this when you have background processes that have persistent access to these files. I've used the 'aws' gem and S3 libraries for this, and its really easy to use, you can read more about it here: http://amazon.rubyforge.org/
However, if you intend for this to be a small app and are not deploying on Heroku, just saving it to a local directory is a lot easier and pain-free
This is my first Rails project. I'm a bit stumped on how image files should be saved in the database, since they take up a lot of space. My site is going to be one where people upload a lot of images. In my migration for creating the pictures table, would I save the image file name as a string? Also does anyone have hints on where to save the images (assets, public, etc)?
Sorry, I'm just a noob looking for a little guidance.
You should consider storing your images on Amazon's S3 (or a similar alternative) instead of the database. You can use gems like paperclip to help you with uploading to a remote storage server.
However, if you really do want to store the binary image data in the database, then you probably want to use 'blob' as the column datatype.
You can also use carrierwave. Just create a string column and mount an uploader on it.
Blobs should only be used in special cases!
You save the images as files on a storage system on a server or the cloud. Then, you create a record in your table with the path to it.
Do not store an images byte for byte\BOLB.
Im desiging an app which allows users to upload images (max 500k per image, roughly 20 images) from their hard drive to the site so as to be able to make some custom boardgames (e.g. snakes and ladders) in pdf formate. These will be created with prawn instantly and then made available for instant download.
Neither the images uploaded nor the pdfs created need to be saved on my apps side permanently. The moment the user downloads the pdf they are no longer needed.
Heroku doesn't support saving files to the system (it does allow to the tmp directory but says you shouldnt rely on it striking it out for me). I'm wondering what tools / services I should be looking into to get round this. Ive looked into paperclip, I'm wondering if this is right for this type of job.
Paperclip is on the right track, but the key insight is you need to use the S3 storage backend (Paperclip uses the FS by default which as you've noticed is no good on Heroku). It's pretty handy; instead of flushing writes out to the file system, it uses the AWS::S3 gem to upload them to S3. You can read more about it in the rdoc here: http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip/blob/master/lib/paperclip/storage/s3.rb
Here's how the flow would work:
I'd let your users upload their multiple source images. Here's an article on allowing multiple attachments to one model with paperclip: http://www.cordinc.com/blog/2009/04/multiple-attachments-with-vali.html.
Then when you're ready to generate the PDF (probably in a background job, right?), what you do is download all the source images to somewhere in tmp/ (make sure the directory is based on your model id or something so if two people do this at once, the files don't get stepped on). Once you've got all the images downloaded, you can generate your PDF. I know this is using the file system, but as long as you do all your filesystem interactions in one request or job cycle, it will work, your files will still be there. I use this method in a couple production web apps. You can't count on tmp/ being there between requests, but within one it's reliably there.
Storing your generated PDF on S3 with paperclip makes sense too, since then you can just hand your users the S3 URL. If you want you can make something to clear the files off every so often if you don't want to pay the S3 costs, but they should be trivial.
Paperclip sounds like an ideal candidate. It will save images in RAILS_ROOT/public/system/, which is both persistent and private (shouldn't be able to be enumerated on shared hosting).
You can configure it to produce thumbnails of your images if you wish.
And it can remove the images it manages when the associated model is destroyed - after your user downloads their PDF, and you delete the record from the database.
Prawn might not be appropriate, depending on the complexity of the PDFs you need to generate. If you have $$$, go for PrinceXML and the princely gem. I've had some success with wkhtmltopdf, which generates PDFs from a Webkit render of HTML/CSS - but it doesn't support any of the advanced page manipulation stuff that Prince does.