Is there a best directory to place image uploads on heroku? - ruby-on-rails

I'm using carrierwave and I want to change the directory where images are stored.
Right now the image URL is /uploads/modelname/image/51/nameoffile.jpg
the store_dir in ImageUploader is
def store_dir
"uploads/#{model.class.to_s.underscore}/#{mounted_as}/#{model.id}"
end
I definitely do not want the modelname to show
Is there an accepted ideal path where images should be stored on heroku?

Heroku doesn't allow uploads to their servers. You need to use another storage medium, like Amazon's S3.
I'm actually using Parse's (www.parse.com) API to store images on their solution. But it depends how you need access to your images.

You can upload files to the Heroku dyno filesystems but the filesystem are perishable and not shared among your dynos. Here's a Gist showing how to make Carrierwave store uploaded file in AWS S3 which is a better option: https://gist.github.com/cblunt/1303386
Here's a Heroku guide for accomplishing this with PaperClip: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/paperclip-s3

Related

Carrierwave + Heroku

Any idea how to use Carrierwave to upload images with Heroku.
I added this to the uploader file:
def cache_dir
"#{Rails.root}/tmp/uploads"
end
but images still don't save! After uploading an image, it saves and once you refresh the page, the image breaks.
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks
I do not think you can use Heroku and upload images without 3rd party storage service like Amazon S3.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3
Heroku allows you store files inside tmp but just in order to send to a 3rd party service. Inside carrierwave uploader class you can set for example
storage :fog
instead of default :file and setup uploads to AWS S3. There are other options as well.
One thing is that if you are using a free tier instance on Heroku your upload needs to finish in abut a minute - I would recommend setup where you upload files directly to s3 account.
https://github.com/dwilkie/carrierwave_direct
Hope it helps
The filesystem on Heroku is not persisted. Only files uploaded through deployment mechanisms (git push) are "persisted". Others like the ones in your "#{Rails.root}/tmp/uploads" folder will be erased. That's why they are disappearing.
I have answered a similar question here. Here is a quote:
Your dyno on Heroku has a "read-only" filesystem. In a sense, your files will not be persisted between your dyno restarts and there is no guarantee that they will persist between any two requests. Here is an excerpt from the docs:
Each dyno has its own ephemeral file system, not shared with any other dyno, that is discarded as soon as you disconnect. This file system is populated with the slug archive so one-off dynos can make full use of anything deployed in the application.
You can use the #{Rails.root}/tmp folder as temporary folder, but you need to upload your files to some external storage (S3, some CDN, etc.). Heroku has some addons that makes it easy to handle.

How can I migrate CarrierWave files to a new storage mechanism?

I have a Ruby on Rails site with models using CarrierWave for file handling, currently using local storage. I want to start using cloud storage and I need to migrate existing local files to the cloud. I am wondering if anyone can point out a method for doing this?
Bonus points for using a model attribute that would allow me to do this row-by-row in the background without interrupting my site for extended downtime (in other words, some model rows would still have local storage while others used cloud storage).
My first instinct is to create a new uploader for each model that uses cloud storage, so I have two uploaders on each model, then transferring the files from one to the other, setting an attribute to indicate which file should be used until they are all transferred, then removing the old uploader. That seems a little excessive.
Minimal to Possibly Zero Donwtime Procedure
In my opinion, the easiest and fastest way to accomplish what you want with almost no downtime is this: (I will assume that you will use AWS cloud, but similar procedure is applicable to any cloud service)
Figure out and setup your assets bucket, bucket policies etc for making the assets publicly accessible.
Using s3cmd (command line tool for interacting with S3) or a GUI app, copy entire assets folder from file system to the appropriate folder in S3.
In your app, setup carrierwave and update your models/uploaders for :fog storage.
Do not restart your application yet. Instead bring up rails console and for your models, check that the new assets URL is correct and accessible as planned. For example, for a video model with picture asset, you can check this way:
Video.first.picture.url
This will give you a full cloud URL based on the updated settings. Copy the URL and paste in a browser to make sure that you can get to it fine.
If this works for at least one instance of each model that has assets, you are good to restart your application.
Upon restart, all your assets are being served from cloud, and you didn't need any migrations or multiple uploaders in your models.
(Based on comment by #Frederick Cheung): Using s3cmd (or something similar) rsync or sync the assets folder from the filesystem to S3 to account for assets that were uploaded between steps 2 and 5, if any.
PS: If you need help setting up carrierwave for cloud storage, let me know.
I'd try the following steps:
Change the storage in the uploaders to :fog or what ever you want to use
Write a migration like rails g migration MigrateFiles to let carrierwave get the current files, process them and upload them to the cloud.
If your model looks like this:
class Video
mount_uploader :attachment, VideoUploader
end
The migration would look like this:
#videos = Video.all
#videos.each do |video|
video.remote_attachment_url = video.attachment_url
video.save
end
If you execute this migration the following should happen:
Carrierwave downloads each image because you specified a remote url for the attachment(the current location, like http://test.com/images/1.jpg) and saves it to the cloud because you changed that in the uploader.
Edit:
Since San pointed out this will not work directly you should maybe create an extra column first, run a migration to copy the current attachment_urls from all the videos into that column, change the uploader after that and run the above migration using the copied urls in that new column. With another migration just delete the column again. Not that clean and easy but done in some minutes.
When we use Heroku, most of people suggest to use cloudinary. Free and simple setup.
My case is when we use cloudinary service and need move into aws S3 for some reasons.
This is what i did with the uploader:
class AvatarUploader < CarrierWave::Uploader::Base
def self.set_storage
if ENV['UPLOADER_SERVICE'] == 'aws'
:fog
else
nil
end
end
if ENV['UPLOADER_SERVICE'] == 'aws'
include CarrierWave::MiniMagick
else
include Cloudinary::CarrierWave
end
storage set_storage
end
also, setup the rake task:
task :migrate_cloudinary_to_aws do
profile_image_old_url = []
Profile.where("picture IS NOT NULL").each do |profile_image|
profile_image_old_url << profile_image
end
ENV['UPLOADER_SERVICE'] = 'aws'
load("#{Rails.root}/app/uploaders/avatar_uploader.rb")
Profile.where("picture IS NOT NULL OR cover IS NOT NULL").each do |profile_image|
old_profile_image = profile_image_old_url.detect { |image| image.id == profile_image.id }
profile_image.remote_picture_url = old_profile_image.picture.url
profile_image.save
end
end
The trick is how to change the uploader provider by env variable. Good luck!
I have migrated the Carrier wave files to Amazon s3 with s3cmd and it works.
Here are the steps to follow:
Change the storage kind of the uploader to fog.
Create a bucket on Amazon s3 if you already dont have one.
Install s3cmd on the remote server sudo apt-get install s3cmd
Configure s3cmd s3cmd --configure.
You would need to enter public and secret key here, provided by Amazon.
Sync the files by this command s3cmd sync /path_to_your_files ://bucket_name/
Set this flag --acl-public to upload the file as public and avoid permission issues.
Restart your server
Notes:
sync will not duplicate your records. It will first check if the file is present on remote server or not.

Where do you store uploaded user images

I am not yet using a service such as Amazon S3, so where in the file structure should I store uploaded user images? I want to avoid the public directory as the images are private.
Are you using a plugin to handle your uploads? Many of them allow you to specify a path to store files, if you want to avoid the public folder a reasonable suggestion would be "#{RAILS_ROOT}/uploads/images/"
It's very much a matter of personal taste though.
For example in a carrierwave uploader this will place items in an uploads folder below RAILS_ROOT which is not publicly accessible.
def store_dir
"#{RAILS_ROOT}/uploads/#{model.class.to_s.underscore}/#{mounted_as}/#{model.id}"
end
https://github.com/carrierwaveuploader/carrierwave#changing-the-storage-directory

Rails] Images erased after a new commit on heroku

I'm using Carrierwave to upload images, and my app is on Heroku right now.
Images are uploaded successfully unless I push a new commit to heroku. Images that I uploaded before a push seem to be erased when a new commit comes in. Does anyone know the reason behind and how to fix this issue?
Update:
The problem becomes, using carrierwave on Heroku without a storage server like Amazon EC3. Heroku does not save files in public folder, where carrierwave uploads by default.
app/uploaders/image_uploader.rb:
def store_dir
"uploads/#{model.class.to_s.underscore}/#{mounted_as}/#{model.id}"
end
And you need to change this to somewhere in the tmp folder in order to preserve your image files after each commit. I tried to change it to
"#{Rails.root}/tmp/uploads/#{model.class.to_s.underscore}/#{mounted_as}/#{model.id}"
But it does not work. I checked on my local environment, and the image is stored in the right location successfully. So I guess if I just set the routes to the right location, this could work. Could someone help me with this?
Since Heroku does not allow storing static files (unless it's associated the application itself), you should make Carrierwave upload to a remote repository (e.g. Amazon S3) using fog. Everytime a user uploads a file, the file will be automatically uploaded to your S3 storage instead of Heroku.

Paperclip: migrating from file system storage to Amazon S3

I have a RoR website, where users can upload photos. I use paperclip gem to upload the photos and store them on the server as files. I am planning to move to Amazon S3 for storing the photos. I need to move all my existing photos from server to Amazon S3. Can someone tell me the best way for moving the photos. Thanks !
You'll want to log into your AWS Console and create a bucket structure to facilitate your images. Neither S3 nor Paperclip have any tools in the way of bulk migrations from file system -> s3, you'll need to use the tool s3cmd for that. In particular, you're interested in the s3cmd sync command, something along the lines of:
s3cmd sync ./public/system/images/ s3://imagesbucket
If you have any image urls hard-coded into your database (a la markdown/template code) this might be a little tricky. One option would be to manually update your urls to point to the new bucket. Alternatively, you can rack-rewrite.
You can easily do this by creating a bucket on Amazon S3 that has the same folder structure as your public directory on your Rails app.
So say for instance, you create a new bucket on Amazon S3 called MyBucket and it has a folder in it called images. You'd just move all of your images within your Rails app's images folder over to that new bucket's images folder.
Then you can set up your app to use an asset host like this answer describes: is it good to use S3 for Rails "public/images" and there an easy way to do it?
If you are using image_tag or other tag helpers (javascripts, stylesheets, etc), then it will use that asset_host for production environments and properly generate the URL to your S3 bucket.
I found this script which takes care of moving the images to Amazon S3 bucket using rake task.
https://gist.github.com/924617

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