Question

I have a rails app running on Heroku. I am using paperclip for some simple image uploads for user avatars and some other things, I have S3 set as my backend and everything seems to be working fine except when trying to push to S3 I get the following error:

The AWS Access Key Id you provided does not exist in our records. 

Thinking I mis-pasted my access key and secret key, I tried again, still no luck. Thinking maybe it was just a buggy key I deactivated it and generated a new one. Still no luck.

Now for both keys I have used the S3 browser app on OS X and have been able to connect to each and view my current buckets and add/delete buckets. Is there something I should be looking out for? I have my application’s S3 and paperclip setup like so

development:
  bucket: (unique name)
  access_key_id: ENV['S3_KEY']
  secret_access_key: ENV['S3_SECRET']

test:
  bucket: (unique name)
  access_key_id: ENV['S3_KEY']
  secret_access_key: ENV['S3_SECRET']

production:
  bucket: (unique_name)
  access_key_id: ENV['S3_KEY']
  secret_access_key: ENV['S3_SECRET']

has_attached_file :cover,
    :styles => {
      :thumb => "50x50"
    },
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/s3.yml",
    :path => ":class/:id/:style/:filename"

EDIT NOTE: The ENV[‘S3_KEY’] and ENV[‘S3_SECRET’] are environment variables in heroku which i have tried even using my keys directly and it still doesn’t work

Note: I just added the (unique name) bits, those aren’t actually there–I have also verified bucket names, but I don’t even think this is getting that far. I also have my heroku environment vars setup correctly and have them setup on dev

Answer 1

You aren’t setting a bucket. It’s in your s3.yml file, but you aren’t reading that value from your call to has_attached_file.

Paperclip S3 docs:
http://rubydoc.info/gems/paperclip/Paperclip/Storage/S3#s3_protocol-instance_method

Also, pay attention to those people who are telling you not to use a s3.yml file with Heroku. It’s a waste and just added abstraction that buys you nothing. You already have your ENV set up with the values you need, so use them.

I’ve done this before where I don’t want to push an s3.yml file to Heroku, but I do want to use one for test and development. In an initializer you can do something like this:

# If an s3.yml file exists, use the key, secret key, and bucket values from there.
# Otherwise, pull them from the environment.
if File.exists?("#{Rails.root}/config/s3.yml")
  s3_config = YAML.load_file("#{Rails.root}/config/s3.yml")
  S3[:key] = s3_config[Rails.env]['key']
  S3[:secret] = s3_config[Rails.env]['secret']
  S3[:bucket] = s3_config[Rails.env]['bucket']
else
  S3[:key] = ENV['S3_KEY']
  S3[:secret] = ENV['S3_SECRET']
  S3[:bucket] = ENV['S3_BUCKET']
end

Then when you’re setting up Paperclip in your model, you reference the value like this:

...
:s3_credentials => {
  :access_key_id => S3[:key],
  :secret_access_key => S3[:secret]
},
:bucket => S3[:bucket]

Obviously, this means that you do not want to have your s3.yml file in your git repository (which really, you shouldn’t anyway).