Question

I have a rails app hosted on heroku and a mobile app made with rhodes.

I’d like to send images from the mobile app to my rails app using an HTTP POST request. Since heroku doesn’t allow you to store files, I’m using amazon s3.

I can’t send the file from heroku to s3 because it takes more than 30 seconds and causes a timeout. I’ve seen plenty of examples of uploading a file direct to s3 when the user has a form, but this obviously won’t work in this case.

I tried using the suggestion here:

rails 3, heroku, aws-s3, simply trying to upload a file to S3 that is POSTed (http/multipart) to our app

but I still get a 503 request timeout.

I don’t want to put my amazon s3 keys on the app.

Right now, I feel like my only option is to host my app on EC2 which I would rather not do as I like the simplicity of Heroku.

Also, it seems strange that these uploads would take so long regardless. I’m only posting images from a mobile phone camera, so they’re not huge files.

Answer 1

So I finally figured out how to do this.

After lots of back and forth with AWS reps and Cloudfiles reps and pulling my hair out, I realized it would be a lot less work to just get another rails server that could write to the filesystem.

So, I started another rails app on openshift. It’s just as easy as Heroku to get started (in fact, I might consider moving my rails app there, but it’s too new for my taste right now and doesn’t have the community around it that Heroku does).

Then, I just had to have communications between my two rails apps.

I know it’s not the best/scalable/elegant fix, but it got the job done, and that’s what matters in the end!