I have multiple applications (an admin application, a "public"/non-admin application and a web service application) that all share a single database.
I've gotten the applications to share models and other code where appropriate, so I don't have multiple copies of the same code in each. However, the one task that I've yet to configure is how to share files that get uploaded between applications. I'm using Paperclip to successfully upload files to my applications, but if it uploads the files to the application doing the upload.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to serve all the files from the web service. My idea was that I'd need some type of task executed every time a new file is uploaded to any of the applications to have the file created in the file structure of the web service.
I know I could easily accomplish serving files from a single application if I loaded the files into the database (which is how I accomplished this in a similar application suite), but I'm not sure if that's the best route to go for managing/serving the files. Another idea I had was storing the files in the database and having the web service manage "serving" them and having it create the file on the disk on the first request. After the first request for the file, the web service would serve the file from the disk rather than from the database.
Does anyone have any ideas on what the best way to accomplish this might be? Or any better ideas?
Thank you in advance for any feedback anyone might have on the subject.
I'd recommend putting them in a shared location that is served directly by your front end webserver (not Rails) if you have that kind of setup, in this example it's serving up a location called files that points at a folder on disk. Then in your paperclip options, change the save location.
has_attached_file :image,
:url => "/files/:basename.:extension",
:path => "/var/htdocs/public/files/:basename.:extension"
Are you running all apps on the same UNIX/Linux system? Have you tried creating symbolic links to share the folder that contains the images? The goal is to save all images to the same location. Eliminating the need to throw in complicated hooks for attachment creation.
Paperclip by default stores things at :rails_root/public/system/:attachment/:id/:style/:filename If you're sharing a database you won't have to worry about collisions. And you just need to create a system folder to be used by each app.
You can use one app's public/system folder as the master, or create an entirely new one. From this point on all other system folders that aren't the master one will be referred to slave folders. Once you've chosen your master it's as simple as moving everything in each slave folder to the master folder. Deleting the slave folders and replacing them with a symbolic link to the master folder.
Sample command set to migrate and replace with symlink given the paperclip defaults. It's probably a good idea to stop the server before attempting this.
$ mv /path/to/slave/project/public/system/* /path/to/master/system
$ mv /path/to/slave/project/public/system.bak
$ ln -s /path/to/master/system /path/to/slave/project/public/system
Once you're sure the migration is sucessful you can remove the backup:
$ rm /path/to/slave/project/public/system.bak
Related
Imagine that a user uploads a file called "myAssignment.docx" to Moodle to complete the submission of an assignment. Where would the folder containing "myAssignment.docx" be? Is it in the moodledata folder outside the public web directory or somewhere else? I am trying to locate that folder because I want to monitor its growth to determine when I should upgrade my web hosting service to provide more storage space for files that students upload to the server.
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/File_API_internals#File_storage_on_disk
The simple answer is inside:
$CFG->dataroot.'/filedir'
It is stored in /repository directory from Ver 3.62.
You may have subdirectories. Check which one is used for the purpose.
I am trying to create a dashboard using CSV files, Highcharts.js, and HTML5. In a local development environment I can render the charts using CSVs both on my file system and hosted on the web. The current goal is to deploy the dashboard live on Heroku.
The CSVs will be updated manually - for now - once per day in a consistent format as required by Highcharts. The web application should be able to render the charts with these new, "standardized" CSVs whenever the dashboard page is requested. My question is: where do I host these CSVs? Do I use S3? Do I keep them on my local file system and manually push the updates to heroku daily? If the CSVs are hosted on another machine, is there a way for my application (and only my application) to access them securely?
Thanks!
Use the gem carrierwave direct to upload the file directly from the client to an Amazon S3 bucket.
https://github.com/dwilkie/carrierwave_direct
You basically give the trusted logged in client a temporary key to upload the file, and nothing else, and then the client returns information about the uploaded file to your web app. Make sure you have set the upload to be private to prevent any third parties from trying to brut force find the CSV. You will then need to create a background worker to do the actually work on the CVS file. The gem has some good docs on how to do this.
https://github.com/dwilkie/carrierwave_direct#processing-and-referencing-files-in-a-background-process
In short in the background process you will download the file temporarily to heroku, parse it out, get the data you need and then discard the copy on heroku, and if you want the copy on S3. This way you get around the heroku issue of permanent file storage, and the issue of tied up dynos with direct uploads, because there is nothing like NGINX for file uploads on heroku.
Also make sure that the file size does not exceed the available memory of your worker dyno, otherwise you will crash. Sense you don't seem to need to worry about concurrency I would suggest https://github.com/resque/resque.
Does Paperclip scans the files for errors, malicious software, viruses before uploading to database? If no, what are the viable solutions.
And, is it better to first create a separate folder for each user before they upload files and store in their respective folders? What are the merits and demerits of it? Is it possible to specify this with Paperclip?
Thanks
Re viruses etc, this might be useful - Rails / Heroku - How to anti-virus scan uploaded file?
Re storing each user's files in a seperate folder: the conventional way would be to store every FILE in a separate folder, and then link the files to the user via the database (eg a user_id field on the file records). As far as merits and demerits go, besides it not being conventional, one thing to bear in mind would be that if a user's files are stored in a single folder, then if they upload a two files with the same name then the second would overwrite the first (unless of course you put them in separate folders within the user's folder). This could be a good thing or bad thing depending on your requirements.
BTW - a slightly pedantic note: files aren't uploaded to the database (at least not normally) - they are uploaded to a filesystem, and a corresponding record is created in the database. The files don't go into the database (as i say, usually: it is possible to store files as blobs in the DB but it's not good practise and not usual).
I sort of want to do the reverse of this.
Instead of unzipping and adding the collection files to S3 I want to
On user's request:
generate a bunch of xml files
zip the xml files with some images (pre-existing images hosted on s3)
download zip
Does anybody know agood way of doing this? I think I could manage this no problem on a normal machine but Heroku complicates things somewhat in that it has a read-only filesystem.
From the heroku documentation on the read-only filesystem:
There are two directories that are writeable: ./tmp and ./log (under your application root). If you wish to drop a file temporarily for the duration of the request, you can write to a filename like #{RAILS_ROOT}/tmp/myfile_#{Process.pid}. There is no guarantee that this file will be there on subsequent requests (although it might be), so this should not be used for any kind of permanent storage.
You should be able to pretty easily write your generated xml files to tmp/ and keep track of the names, download and write the s3 files to the same directory, and (maybe?) invoke a zip command as long as the output is in tmp/, then serve the file to the browser with the correct mime type to prompt a download. I would only be concerned with how big the filesize is and if heroku has an undocumented limit on what they'll allow in the tmp directory. Especially since you are only performing this action for a one-time download in the duration of a single request, I think you have a good chance of being able to do it.
Edit: Looking around a bit, you might be able to use something like RubyZip to create your zip file if you want to avoid calling system commands.
I'm working on a Rails app that accepts file uploads and where users can modify these files later. For example, they can change the text file contents or perform basic manipulations on images such as resizing, cropping, rotating etc.
At the moment the files are stored on the same server where Apache is running with Passenger to serve all application requests.
I need to move user files to dedicated server to distribute the load on my setup. At the moment our users upload around 10GB of files in a week, which is not huge amount but eventually it adds up.
And so i'm going through a different options on how to implement the communication between application server(s) and a file server. I'd like to start out with a simple and fool-proof solution. If it scales well later across multiple file servers, i'd be more than happy.
Here are some different options i've been investigating:
Amazon S3. I find it a bit difficult to implement for my application. It adds complexity of "uploading" the uploaded file again (possibly multiple times later), please mind that users can modify files and images with my app. Other than that, it would be nice "set it and forget it" solution.
Some sort of simple RPC server that lives on file server and transparently manages files when looking from the application server side. I haven't been able to find any standard and well tested tools here yet so this is a bit more theorethical in my mind. However, the Bert and Ernie built and used in GitHub seem interesting but maybe too complex just to start out.
MogileFS also seems interesting. Haven't seen it in use (but that's my problem :).
So i'm looking for different (and possibly standards-based) approaches how file servers for web applications are implemented and how they have been working in the wild.
Use S3. It is inexpensive, a-la-carte, and if people start downloading their files, your server won't have to get stressed because your download pages can point directly to the S3 URL of the uploaded file.
"Pedro" has a nice sample application that works with S3 at github.com.
Clone the application ( git clone git://github.com/pedro/paperclip-on-heroku.git )
Make sure that you have the right_aws gem installed.
Put your Amazon S3 credentials (API & secret) into config/s3.yml
Install the Firefox S3 plugin (http://www.s3fox.net/)
Go into Firefox S3 plugin and put in your api & secret.
Use the S3 plugin to create a bucket with a unique name, perhaps 'your-paperclip-demo'.
Edit app/models/user.rb, and put your bucket name on the second last line (:bucket => 'your-paperclip-demo').
Fire up your server locally and upload some files to your local app. You'll see from the S3 plugin that the file was uploaded to Amazon S3 in your new bucket.
I'm usually terribly incompetent or unlucky at getting these kinds of things working, but with Pedro's little S3 upload application I was successful. Good luck.
you could also try and compile a version of Dropbox (they provide the source) and ln -s that to your public/system directory so paperclip saves to it. this way you can access the files remotely from any desktop as well... I haven't done this yet so i can't attest to how easy/hard/valuable it is but it's on my teux deux list... :)
I think S3 is your best bet. With a plugin like Paperclip it's really very easy to add to a Rails application, and not having to worry about scaling it will save on headaches.