Comments on: Paperclip and Amazon S3

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:27:21 +0000

Awesome, I’ve been meaning to push off my picture storage to S3 on one of my apps for a while, I’m about to finally take the plunge thanks to this. Thanks!

By: Charlie Maffitt

Charlie Maffitt — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:24:58 +0000

Thanks – I used this post to set up paperclip with s3, and it works, but I do get some application errors if I call @model.attachment.exists? in the code.

The error goes something like “Key can not be blank.”

A workaround is to check to see if @model.attachment_file_name.blank? instead, since it won’t have a file name if the attachment doesn’t exist, but I was wondering if anyone else has had this same problem with referring directly to the attachment, and if so how did you fix it?

By: Clayton

Clayton — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 04:03:05 +0000

I should really do an updated one of these since it’s so old, but thanks!

By: Gordon

Gordon — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:57:26 +0000

Great S3 and Paperclip walkthrough, thanks for the post!

By: Travis Roberts

Travis Roberts — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:54:47 +0000

The newest version of paperclip now has the default filesystem storage path as “:rails_root/public/system/:attachment/:id/:style/:filename”. This solves the problem that you had because, if you use Capistrano, the “system” folder is already symlinked from your “public” folder.

Thanks for the S3 help, though! Just what I was looking for.

By: Jimmy Baker

Jimmy Baker — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:58:39 +0000

Another option for you would have been to symlink the folder where you want to store your images. In most cases and files that need to persist across deploys will go in the “shared” folder inside your deploy path.

This little capistrano recipe does just that:

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task :after_symlink do
  run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/images/products #{release_path}/public/images/"
end

This post answered my questions about the s3 storage option. Thanks a bunch!