There are many ways to upload photos to a Rails application, and quite a few resources on the web. This is what worked for me.

Gemfile

You want to include the AWS and Paperclip gems in your Gemfile.

# Amazon web services
gem 'aws-sdk'

# Images
gem 'paperclip'

Create a Photos Controller

You can scaffold your photos, or create an individual controllers, models and views, depending on the needs of your application. When you create your migration, you want to use attachment, so your migration may look something like:

rails g scaffold Photo attachment:photo description:text

Your controller should function like any other controller in your application.

Photo Model

In addition to what would normally be included in your model, you should include your AWS settings, as follows:

  has_attached_file :photo

Set up Amazon S3

Amazon S3 has decent documentation, and you should be able to follow the guidelines for setting up an Amazon S3 account. Make sure you get your API Key and Secret Access Key, as you will need those to include in your Rails application.

You will also need to create a bucket for your photos to be sent, and make sure the photos in that bucket are set to public, so you can render them in your views.

Views

Wherever you choose to upload your photo, this is how to add the “choose file” button to your form:

<%= f.file_field :photo, placeholder: "Upload Photo"%>

You should be able to render the images later by calling the photo method (or whatever you called this attribute in your migration):

<%= image_tag current_user.photo %>

AWS File

Create an aws.yml file in your config directory. In this file, include your AWS API keys for development. Make sure you include this file in your .gitignore file, or you risk pushing your API keys to GitHub.

development:
  access_key_id:
  secret_access_key:

Configure Your Environments

In your config/environments directory, you should have production.rb and development.rb  files. In each file, include the configuration for S3. In development, your API keys will be located in aws.yml, but in production, they will be included as environment variables which will be input into Heroku (or whoever is hosting your application).

Your development environment should include:

 # Amazon Web Services - S3
  config.paperclip_defaults = {
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => {
      :bucket => 'consignnyc',
      :s3_credentials => "#{Rails.root}/config/aws.yml",
    }
  }

Your production environment should include:

  # Amazon Web Services S3
  config.paperclip_defaults = {
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => {
      :bucket => 'consignnyc', 
      :access_key_id => ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY'],
      :secret_access_key => ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']
    }
  }

Manipulating Images

You will probably also want to download Imagemagick and use the mini_magick gem to manipulate photos. You probably also want to add validations regarding photo size.

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Koren Leslie Cohen

Product manager at Facebook. Former senior product manager at Dollar Shave Club in Los Angeles and software engineer at J.Crew / Madewell in New York City. Recovering trial lawyer.

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