image upload not working on heroku with s3 - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm using the Paperclip gem to handle image uploads on my Rails app. Everything works great in development but when I upload an image on the heroku app I get the "Something went wrong" error. I checked the heroku logs and I don't see any error messages. However, the one difference I noticed between dev and heroku is that the dev logs shows that the "begin..insert into...etc" SQL shows, whereas in heroku the logs don't show any SQL. It doesn't even get to write to the database.
The heroku logs only show the "Parameters" and some commands afterwards:
Parameters: {"utf8"=>"✓", "authenticity_token"=>"****", "show"=>{"name"=>"test", "description"=>"this is a description", "cover"=>#<ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile:0x007f3776700fd0 #tempfile=#<Tempfile:/tmp/RackMultipart20140427-2-1431xte>, #original_filename="bc_top.png", #content_type="image/png", #headers="Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"show[cover]\"; filename=\"bc_top.png\"\r\nContent-Type: image/png\r\n">, "thumbnail"=>#<ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile:0x007f3776700eb8 #tempfile=#<Tempfile:/tmp/RackMultipart20140427-2-al452c>, #original_filename="bc_cover.png", #content_type="image/png", #headers="Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"show[thumbnail]\"; filename=\"bc_cover.png\"\r\nContent-Type: image/png\r\n">}, "commit"=>"Add show"}
Then it shows some other commands but no errors:
Command :: file -b --mime '/tmp/bdccc4601dd7e6aea5035c03817bca8020140427-2-2i17k4.png'
2014-04-27T16:06:34.040235+00:00 app[web.1]: Command :: file -b --mime '/tmp/68aaf40ebdc9b119d96bb0b3ff13118020140427-2-189rb23.png'
2014-04-27T16:06:34.150632+00:00 app[web.1]: Command :: file -b --mime '/tmp/bdccc4601dd7e6aea5035c03817bca8020140427-2-bfdlsj.png'
2014-04-27T16:06:33.966054+00:00 app[web.1]: vendor/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/gems/rack-1.5.2/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:60:in `service'
2014-04-27T16:06:33.966069+00:00 app[web.1]: Started POST "/shows" for 76.***.***.** at 2014-04-27 16:06:33 +0000
2014-04-27T16:06:33.966071+00:00 app[web.1]: Processing by ShowsController#create as HTML
2014-04-27T16:06:34.099317+00:00 app[web.1]: Command :: file -b --mime '/tmp/68aaf40ebdc9b119d96bb0b3ff13118020140427-2-5r5s9s.png'
2014-04-27T16:06:34.446474+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=POST path=/shows host=app.herokuapp.com request_id=1bc386a4-147c-403a-9b88-55fe488ec4e3 fwd="76.***.***.**" dyno=web.1 connect=2ms service=676ms status=500 bytes=919
I'm completely stumped. No errors! Here are the relevant files:
production.rb
appName::Application.configure do
# Settings specified here will take precedence over those in config/application.rb
# Code is not reloaded between requests
config.cache_classes = true
# Full error reports are disabled and caching is turned on
config.consider_all_requests_local = false
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
# Disable Rails's static asset server (Apache or nginx will already do this)
config.serve_static_assets = false
# Compress JavaScripts and CSS
config.assets.compress = true
# Don't fallback to assets pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed
config.assets.compile = true
# Generate digests for assets URLs
config.assets.digest = true
config.assets.precompile = [ /\A[^\/\\]+\.(ccs|js)$/i ]
# Defaults to nil and saved in location specified by config.assets.prefix
# config.assets.manifest = YOUR_PATH
# Specifies the header that your server uses for sending files
# config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = "X-Sendfile" # for apache
# config.action_dispatch.x_sendfile_header = 'X-Accel-Redirect' # for nginx
# Force all access to the app over SSL, use Strict-Transport-Security, and use secure cookies.
# config.force_ssl = true
# See everything in the log (default is :info)
# config.log_level = :debug
# Prepend all log lines with the following tags
# config.log_tags = [ :subdomain, :uuid ]
# Use a different logger for distributed setups
# config.logger = ActiveSupport::TaggedLogging.new(SyslogLogger.new)
# Use a different cache store in production
# config.cache_store = :mem_cache_store
# Enable serving of images, stylesheets, and JavaScripts from an asset server
# config.action_controller.asset_host = "http://assets.example.com"
# Precompile additional assets (application.js, application.css, and all non-JS/CSS are already added)
# config.assets.precompile += %w( search.js )
# Disable delivery errors, bad email addresses will be ignored
# config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false
# Enable threaded mode
# config.threadsafe!
# Enable locale fallbacks for I18n (makes lookups for any locale fall back to
# the I18n.default_locale when a translation can not be found)
config.i18n.fallbacks = true
# Send deprecation notices to registered listeners
config.active_support.deprecation = :notify
# Log the query plan for queries taking more than this (works
# with SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL)
# config.active_record.auto_explain_threshold_in_seconds = 0.5
# config/environments/production.rb
config.paperclip_defaults = {
:storage => :s3,
:s3_credentials => {
:bucket => ENV['AWS_BUCKET'],
:access_key_id => ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'],
:secret_access_key => ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']
}
}
end
application.rb
require File.expand_path('../boot', __FILE__)
require 'rails/all'
if defined?(Bundler)
# If you precompile assets before deploying to production, use this line
Bundler.require(*Rails.groups(:assets => %w(development test)))
# If you want your assets lazily compiled in production, use this line
# Bundler.require(:default, :assets, Rails.env)
end
module appName
class Application < Rails::Application
# Settings in config/environments/* take precedence over those specified here.
# Application configuration should go into files in config/initializers
# -- all .rb files in that directory are automatically loaded.
# Custom directories with classes and modules you want to be autoloadable.
# config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/extras)
# Only load the plugins named here, in the order given (default is alphabetical).
# :all can be used as a placeholder for all plugins not explicitly named.
# config.plugins = [ :exception_notification, :ssl_requirement, :all ]
# Activate observers that should always be running.
# config.active_record.observers = :cacher, :garbage_collector, :forum_observer
# Set Time.zone default to the specified zone and make Active Record auto-convert to this zone.
# Run "rake -D time" for a list of tasks for finding time zone names. Default is UTC.
# config.time_zone = 'Central Time (US & Canada)'
# The default locale is :en and all translations from config/locales/*.rb,yml are auto loaded.
# config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}').to_s]
# config.i18n.default_locale = :de
# Configure the default encoding used in templates for Ruby 1.9.
config.encoding = "utf-8"
# Configure sensitive parameters which will be filtered from the log file.
config.filter_parameters += [:password]
# Enable escaping HTML in JSON.
config.active_support.escape_html_entities_in_json = true
# Use SQL instead of Active Record's schema dumper when creating the database.
# This is necessary if your schema can't be completely dumped by the schema dumper,
# like if you have constraints or database-specific column types
# config.active_record.schema_format = :sql
# Enforce whitelist mode for mass assignment.
# This will create an empty whitelist of attributes available for mass-assignment for all models
# in your app. As such, your models will need to explicitly whitelist or blacklist accessible
# parameters by using an attr_accessible or attr_protected declaration.
config.active_record.whitelist_attributes = true
# Enable the asset pipeline
config.assets.enabled = true
# Version of your assets, change this if you want to expire all your assets
config.assets.version = '1.0'
config.serve_static_assets = true
end
end
initializer/paperclip.rb
Paperclip::Attachment.default_options[:storage] = :s3
Paperclip::Attachment.default_options[:s3_protocol] = 'http'
Paperclip::Attachment.default_options[:s3_credentials] =
{ :bucket => ENV['AWS_BUCKET'],
:access_key_id => ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'],
:secret_access_key => ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'] }
Show model (object with the file attachments)
class Show < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :episodes
has_attached_file :thumbnail
validates_attachment_content_type :thumbnail, :content_type => /\Aimage\/.*\Z/
has_attached_file :cover
validates_attachment_content_type :cover, :content_type => /\Aimage\/.*\Z/
end
I double checked my heroku config vars and they match up fine. I have this working on a different Rails 3 app and I'm wondering if I am missing something on this new Rails 4 app. Any ideas?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Heroku logs don't always help.
For your purposes since you're just getting started I would recommend setting your heroku app to "development" mode so you can see verbose error messages.
heroku config # Should return a list of your current environment, including RACK_ENV=production
heroku config:add RACK_ENV=development # now you'll get verbose error messages
heroku config:add RACK_ENV=production # set this back when you're done debugging
Check out the logs and tell us what you see.
But I would recommend that you use direct upload to S3. I've written about uploading images to S3 over here (http://blog.jobspire.net/uploading-images-to-heroku/). So do take a look.
Also Heroku has a read-only filesystem. That means Paperclip cannot save uploaded files to any place within Heroku. That might be the issue.
If you would like to be able to upload files to an application hosted
on Heroku, then you must either store the files as binary blobs within
your database or you must use a separate service to store the files.
If you are looking for a separate service, Paperclip has built-in
support for integrating with Amazon S3.
See the relevant Heroku docs.