Question

here was my situation.

I was using paperclip to let user upload images. It did well and everything was okay. Then,I pushed it to heroku. For the momment, I can see all my images that was just upload by users. However, everytime make a new commit and push to heroku again, all of my previous images gone. It’s seems like dont have the file anymore,cant load it.

So,here what i thought:
Is it every time i pushed to the heroku server, the images file that was in local was uploaded to the heroku server?

I did research for my problem for it,and im not really understand what they actually said about heroku and i don’t know is it is the same problem with me.

Heroku has a read-only filesystem. That means Paperclip cannot save uploaded files to any place within Heroku.

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.

I found out that Amazon S3 need credit card to register,if i do not have credit card,then i cannot use their services??

Any detail advices and explaination is appreciated .Thanks you

Answer 1

Amazon is not a free device, you must to give your credit-card number to use it. However You pay only what you use but it is not expensive. For example for my websites, last month I paid $2.46 for 15Gb of storage and I paid $1.90 for 16Gb of data transfert.

To use S3 with paperclip, you need to add gem 'aws-s3' to your Gemfile

Next you need to add config/s3.yml your assets credentials, for example :

production:
  access_key_id: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
  secret_access_key: BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
  bucket: assets.my-bucket

Then I have a model which store my assets, for example :

class Asset
  has_attached_file :asset, 
    :styles => {  :thumb => "60x60#", :large => "700x330#"},
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => "#{Rails.root}/config/s3.yml",
    :path => "/images/:id/:style.:extension"
  validates_attachment_content_type :asset, :content_type => ['image/gif', 'image/jpeg', 'image/png', 'image/x-ms-bmp']
end

I hope it helps