I read here that Heroku doesn't allow you to store photos on their server and that people use CarrierWave gem with Amazon to store photos. However, I just watched Ryan Bate's Carrier Wave RailsCasts and he also mentions how CarrierWave has a remote url option whereby it will, in his words, "download" the photo from a URL and display it on your site. Does this mean that it stays on the remote server and just gets presented by CarrierWave on the Heroku site? I assume Carrier Wave's not somehow attempting to transfer the image at the url to the new server?
Might be a stupid question but I don't know a lot about servers (or anything :)))
the remote url option for CarrierWave gives the user a different way of providing the picture to your server: instead of uploading the picture file directly, the user may give a URL where the picture is (say, on a Flickr account, or something). When this is provided to the application using CarrierWave, the picture is downloaded from the third-party location (given by the url) to the application server -- just as if the user had uploaded it directly -- and then stored to Amazon's S3.
Related
Is it possible to use carrier wave to upload directly to amazon's S3 without using my server?
What i mean is, I don't want the images first going to my ec2 instance, and then uploaded to s3. I believe there is a way to upload directly to S3 to save my server's resources from having to process/stream the file.
I am just looking into carierwave, does it support nice html5 uploads where the user can just drag and drop the file on the web page?
If you want to upload directly to S3 from the browser you must do it with Javascript.
Heroku provides a nice tutorial : https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/direct-to-s3-image-uploads-in-rails
Once uploaded, you can pass the finale S3 public URL of the image in a hidden field and download it server-side with carrierwave for further manipulation (resizing, ...)
I have a RoR web app that allow users upload images and use Cloudinary as cloud storage. I read their document and find a cool way called "direct uploading" which reduce my server's loading. To my knowledge, the spirit is changing workflow
image -> server -> Cloudinary
to
image -> Cloudinary
and my server only store an Cloudinary url to database, not the image file (Tell me if I'm wrong, thx).
So my question is, how to check whether I have changed to "direct uploading" method successfully? Open element inspector to see time cost for each POST and GET requests? Other better options?
I expect big advances via this way, but how can I feel it?
Thanks form a rookie =)
# The app is deployed on heroku.
# Doesn't change to direct uploading method yet.
# This app is private, only serve for around 10 people.
You can indeed (and it is very recommended to) bypass your server and let Cloudinary take care of the upload processing directly. This indeed lowers the processing of your server to simply store the uploaded image's details, and the image is directly stored in your Cloudinary account. This indeed quickens the upload process. You can test out the sample project which demonstrates both server-side and client-side uploads.
i am using paperclip gem to upload images on the server side, i need to get updated with the bytes loaded on server through the upload process.
my aim is to update the progress bar accordingly. how do I do this?
You can only do this by using a Flash-based uploading tool which has direct access to the file and the upload stream. Just integrate it with Paperclip (and there are a ton of examples on google showing how to)
I would recommend one of these:
http://plupload.com/
http://www.uploadify.com/
I would like to know if Google App Engine can be used as a Content delivery network like aws S3. I'm running a RoR app on Heroku and I would like store my uploaded files on GAE instead of s3.
If it's possible what would be the best way to do it?
http://24ways.org/2008/using-google-app-engine-as-your-own-cdn
It won't be able to host files over 1MB though.
Make sure to read through the comments on that blog post as well, some have concerns about the terms of service.
GAE in itself isn't meant to be a CDN... that doesn't, however, stop you from writing a CDN application on top of it. The only limit you'll need to worry about is the 50 MB limit on the size of the blobstore. Such an app will have to provide a URL that you can hit to get the upload URL, which could then be used to upload the file. The download url can also be generated with the upload URL, and used to access the content.
Can one of the Amazon services (their S3 data service, or otherwise) be used to offload server of static files for a Ruby on Rails app, but still support the app's authentication & authorization?
That is such that when the user browser downloaded the initial HTML for one page of the Ruby on Rails application, when it went back for static content (e.g. an image or CSS file), that this request would be:
(a) routed directly to the Amazon service (no RoR cycles used to serve it, or bandwidth), BUT
(b) the browser request for this item (e.g. an image) would still have to go through an authentication/authorization layer based on the user model in the Ruby on Rails application - in other words to ensure not just anyone could get the image...
thanks
The answer is a yes with a but. You can use a feature of S3 that allows you to create links to secure S3 objects that has a small time to live, default is 5 minutes. This will work for any S3 object that is uploaded as private. This means that the browser will only have X seconds or whatever to request the file from S3. Example code from docs for the AWS gem:
S3Object.url_for('beluga_baby.jpg', 'marcel_molina')
You can also specify an expires_in or expires option per file. The bad thing is that you would need to create a helper for your stylesheet, image, and js links to create the proper S3 URLs.
I would recommend that you setup a domain name for your S3 bucket, like "examples3.amazonaws.com" and put all your standard image files and CSS there as public. Then set that as the asset host in your rails config. Then, only use the secure links for static files that really need it.