Paperclip S3 Storage

This gem will force paperclip to store attachments on S3 if your application is in production. It’s great for Heroku apps.

Important Notes

If you’re in fact using Heroku, and you want the attachments to have custom paths. PLEASE do not use RAILS_ROOT. Why? Every time you deploy your app to Heroku, you’re changing the RAILS_ROOT, so all your uploaded files will be lost and your bucket WILL be a mess!

A default, Heroku-working path is on by default, so you can just use it.

How to Use

Add the gem to your Gemfile with

gem “paperclip-s3”

and run

bundle install

.

Then, you’ll need to setup some ENV variables. You will need to provide a secret key, an access key and a bucket. (You can provide an s3_credentials hash options with access_key_id and secret_access_key instead.)

If you are using Heroku, you can use the

config:add

command:

  heroku config:add S3_BUCKET=your_bucket_name
  heroku config:add S3_KEY=your_access_key
  heroku config:add S3_SECRET=your_secret_key

If you are using https as the S3 Protocol, you can also specify it as a Heroku environment variable.

  heroku config:add S3_PROTOCOL=https

Notice that the S3 protocol will default to http

You can optionally specify which environments will use S3 with the S3_ENVIRONMENTS variable (using a comma-separated list).

  ENV['S3_ENVIRONMENTS'] = 'staging,production' # defaults to production only

After you’ve done this, you can use paperclip normally. The gem just extends the methods and changes the options to force the S3 Storage. You can even use the same options (like path, default_style, etc.)

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_attached_file :avatar, default_url: "/images/defaults/photo-missing.jpg"
  end

Contribute

Feel free to fork, fix/patch/extend this. Everything is welcome.