I am building a web app with a ReactJS for my front-end and a rails back-end API. I have to display only 4 images in total in the whole app; these 4 images are picked among a group of approximatively 50 images, and that group isn't going to grow much (maximum 10 more images per year). The 4 images are supposed to change every 3 to 7 days.
So I was thinking, in terms of productivity, performance and price, what is the best way to handle my images between the following:
Create a local, static img folder in my React front-end, with all
the images, and import them in my components.
Use a Image upload/storage service like e.g. Cloudinary, Imgx, AWS S3... with my rails back-end to serve my images.
Or maybe there is even a better solution than these two ?
Due to the nature of the software you're describing, I'd suggest you go with creating local and static images in your react front-end app.
The main reason for this is that:
You've mentioned that it's not going to be more than 10 images per year, so it's easy to handle it manually whenever you need to update it.
You won't be depending on a third-party in terms of storage (unlike using AWS S3, or any other provider, where you'll be unnecessarily depending on it)
The images will work independently of the backend API server, so even if there's some kind of failure in the backend, the platform will be even more robust, by not depending on the backend server to show these images.
This will also reduce the bandwidth used between server & client, every image request will be "hitting" the client app, which should have been automatically cached the JS, CSS and Images file, so it'd be automatically optimized for better scaling.
In my application I have around 400 images that need to be displayed at various times. There will be no user uploaded imagery. In other words, I control all the pictures being used within my application.
I'm wondering what the recommended route is. Would it be best to put all the images in app/assets/images or would it be better to upload all of them to a 3rd party service like AWS?
The application will eventually be living through Heroku. Thanks.
From this question (and first comment), your total compiled code and assets cannot exceed 100MB. As long as you keep under this, you'll be fine with Heroku. However, if you exceed that, or the number of files will change dramatically or consistently, I'd recommend Cloudinary, which gives you 500MB of FREE (file)storage and is available as a Heroku Add-on.
I am interested in understanding the different approaches to handling large file uploads in a Rails application, 2-5Gb files.
I understand that in order to transfer a file of this size it will need to be broken down into smaller parts, I have done some research and here is what I have so far.
Server-side config will be required to accept large POST requests and probably a 64bit machine to handle anything over 4Gb.
AWS supports multipart upload.
HTML5 FileSystemAPI has a persistent uploader that uploads the file in chunks.
A library for Bitorrent although this requires a transmission client which is not ideal
Can all of these methods be resumed like FTP, the reason I dont want to use FTP is that I want to keep in the web app if this is possible? I have used carrierwave and paperclip but I am looking for something that will be able to be resumed as uploading a 5Gb file could take some time!
Of these approaches I have listed I would like to undertand what has worked well and if there are other approaches that I may be missing? No plugins if possible, would rather not use Java Applets or Flash. Another concern is that these solutions hold the file in memory while uploading, that is also a constraint I would rather avoid if possible.
I've dealt with this issue on several sites, using a few of the techniques you've illustrated above and a few that you haven't. The good news is that it is actually pretty realistic to allow massive uploads.
A lot of this depends on what you actually plan to do with the file after you have uploaded it... The more work you have to do on the file, the closer you are going to want it to your server. If you need to do immediate processing on the upload, you probably want to do a pure rails solution. If you don't need to do any processing, or it is not time-critical, you can start to consider "hybrid" solutions...
Believe it or not, I've actually had pretty good luck just using mod_porter. Mod_porter makes apache do a bunch of the work that your app would normally do. It helps not tie up a thread and a bunch of memory during the upload. It results in a file local to your app, for easy processing. If you pay attention to the way you are processing the uploaded files (think streams), you can make the whole process use very little memory, even for what would traditionally be fairly expensive operations. This approach requires very little actual setup to your app to get working, and no real modification to your code, but it does require a particular environment (apache server), as well as the ability to configure it.
I've also had good luck using jQuery-File-Upload, which supports good stuff like chunked and resumable uploads. Without something like mod_porter, this can still tie up an entire thread of execution during upload, but it should be decent on memory, if done right. This also results in a file that is "close" and, as a result, easy to process. This approach will require adjustments to your view layer to implement, and will not work in all browsers.
You mentioned FTP and bittorrent as possible options. These are not as bad of options as you might think, as you can still get the files pretty close to the server. They are not even mutually exclusive, which is nice, because (as you pointed out) they do require an additional client that may or may not be present on the uploading machine. The way this works is, basically, you set up an area for them to dump to that is visible by your app. Then, if you need to do any processing, you run a cron job (or whatever) to monitor that location for uploads and trigger your servers processing method. This does not get you the immediate response the methods above can provide, but you can set the interval to be small enough to get pretty close. The only real advantage to this method is that the protocols used are better suited to transferring large files, the additional client requirement and fragmented process usually outweigh any benefits from that, in my experience.
If you don't need any processing at all, your best bet may be to simply go straight to S3 with them. This solution falls down the second you actually need to do anything with the files other than server them as static assets....
I do not have any experience using the HTML5 FileSystemAPI in a rails app, so I can't speak to that point, although it seems that it would significantly limit the clients you are able to support.
Unfortunately, there is not one real silver bullet - all of these options need to be weighed against your environment in the context of what you are trying to accomplish. You may not be able to configure your web server or permanently write to your local file system, for example. For what it's worth, I think jQuery-File-Upload is probably your best bet in most environments, as it only really requires modification to your application, so you could move an implementation to another environment most easily.
This project is a new protocol over HTTP to support resumable upload for large files. It bypass Rails by providing its own server.
http://tus.io/
http://www.jedi.be/blog/2009/04/10/rails-and-large-large-file-uploads-looking-at-the-alternatives/ has some good comparisons of the options, including some outside of Rails.
Please go through it.It was helpful in my case
Also another site to go to is:-
http://bclennox.com/extremely-large-file-uploads-with-nginx-passenger-rails-and-jquery
Please let me know if any of this does not work out
I would by-pass the rails server and post your large files(split into chunks) directly from the browser to Amazon Simple Storage. Take a look at this post on splitting files with JavaScript. I'm a little curious how performant this setup would be and I feel like tinkering with this setup this weekend.
I think that Brad Werth nailed the answer
just one approach could be upload directly to S3 (and even if you do need some reprocessing after you could theoretical use aws lambda to notify your app ... but to be honest I'm just guessing here, I'm about to solve the same problem myself, I'll expand on this later)
http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1434
if you use carrierwave
https://github.com/dwilkie/carrierwave_direct_example
Uploading large files on Heroku with Carrierwave
Let me also pin down few options that might help others looking for a real world solution.
I have a Rails 6 with Ruby 2.7 and the main purpose of this app is to create a Google drive like environment where users can upload images and videos and them process them again for high quality.
Obviously we did tried using local processing using Sidekiq background jobs but it was overwhelming during large uploads like 1GB and more.
We did tried tuts.io but personally I think is not quite easy to setup just like Jquery File uploads.
So we experimented with AWS..moving in steps listed below and it worked like a charm....uploading directly to S3 from the browser.
using React drop zone uploader...we uploads multiple files to S3.
we setup Aws Lambda for an input bucket to get triggered for all types of object creations on that bucket.
this Lambda converts the file and again uploads the reprocessed one to another one - output bucket and notifies us using Aws SNS to keep a track of what worked and what failed.
in Rails side... we just dynamically use the new output bucket and then serve it with Aws Cloud-front distribution.
You may check Aws notes on MediaConvert to check step by step guide and they also have a well written Github repos for all sorts of experimentation.
So, from the user's point of view, he can upload one large file, with Acceleration enabled on the S3, the React library show uploading progress and once it gets uploaded, Rails callback api again verifies its existence in the S3 BUCKET like mybucket/user_id/file_uploaded_slug and then its confirmed to user through a simple flash message.
You can also configure Lambda to notify end user on successful upload/encoding, if needed.
Refer this documentation - https://github.com/mike1011/aws-media-services-vod-automation/tree/master/MediaConvert-WorkflowWatchFolderAndNotification
Hope it helps someone here.
Initially I wanted to host my application on Heroku, but since the file-system on Heroku is read-only, I would need to store uploaded images on Amazon S3 or something similar.
The pictures mostly have mobile phone camera quality (I think something between 500kb - 1MB). I would like to also create thumbnails of those pictures with Rails and save them.
Since I don't know how much traffic I will have, the whole system should be scalable.
Is there a better/cheaper alternative to the above (Heroku + S3), e.g. storing images in the database or other hosters?
This really depends on whether you want to stay with a PaaS (i.e. Heroku, Azure, etc.), or if you want to go with a IaaS (i.e. AWS). Given that you stated Heroku, I will assume you want a PaaS. I'm not sure of the exact cost difference between services (but I can get this for you if needed), but combining Heroku + S3 + (Paperclip || Carrierwave) = an incredibly fast solution that scales. Then in the future you can look into cutting costs, once you prove your idea.
I am using PhantomJS to dynamically generate 10 large images of websites at a time in each request. Therefore it is important that I cache these images and check if they are cached so I can serve them up. I've never cached images before, so I have no idea how to do this.
Some other information:
PhantomJS writes images to your local filesystem at the path you specify.
I want to cache these images but also need to balance that with updating the cache if the websites have updated.
I will be running these image generation processes in parallel.
I'm thinking of using Amazon's Elastic MapReduce to take advantage of Hadoop and to help with the load. I've never used it before, so any advice here would be appreciated.
I am pretty much a complete noob with this, so in depth explanations with examples would be really helpful.
What's your front-end web server? Since PhantomJS can write images to your local filesystem at any path you specify, you should specify the document root of your web server so you're serving them statically. This way Rails doesn't even have to be involved.