Question

I would appreciate any feedback regarding what may be causing my issue, described below.

I have an application that allows users to upload images. Everything works fine in development and used to work fine in production.

Recently, my newer images have all broken. I can upload new images, but when I check back a few hours later, the images are broken again. This started happening about a week ago, and images that I’ve had up in production from before then are still ok.

I am using Rails with Bootstrap and SimpleForm, and using Paperclip for the images. I am using Postgres in both devleopment and production, and am deploying to Heroku.

The only hint I have is in the “blank_profile_pic.png” image that I use as a default when users don’t have a profile picture uploaded.

User.all.each do |u|
  if u.profile_pic.file?
    image_tag(user.profile_pic)
  else
    image_tag("blank_profile_pic.png")
  end
end

For users that don’t have a profile_pic uploaded, a broken image appears if their profile was created in the last week, but the expected “blank_profile_pic.png” remains for people that created their account before the issues started surfacing a week ago. How can the same block of code return different results between recent and older users?

I really don’t know where to start with this, so would appreciate any feedback regarding what possible causes could be, and if there are any other files that I can show here.

Thanks very much for your help!

Answer 1

Heroku is a read only system. So you most definitely have to upload your images either to S3 or some other cloud provided.

Your images might have been uploaded to /tmp in Heroku and then somehow it was cleared, hence the errors.

Here are the docs: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/read-only-filesystem

And configuring Paperclip with S3: https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip#storage