Update: Amazon S3, Paperclip and a Curious Case of Singapore Buckets

Apr 25, 2012

This is an update of my previous blog post, “How to get Paperclip and AWS S3 Singapore and European Buckets Working”.

Since the post last year in December, Amazon had released its official AWS SDK for ruby which is now available as the ‘aws-sdk’ rubygem.

Paperclip had also made an update in its core to directly support AWS-SDK over marcel’s AWS-S3 gem.

This little guide is supposed to help you get quickly started uploading your images into S3 via Paperclip and the new gem.

This guide works for Rails 3.x and above.

Step 1: Get your Gems

# Gemfile
gem 'aws-sdk'
gem 'paperclip'

Step 2: Create your Paperclip Model

Step 3: Create your Amazon S3 credentials

In /config/s3.yml create:

#/config/s3.yml
development:
  bucket: <name>-dev
  access_key_id:
  secret_access_key:

test:
  bucket: <name>-test
  access_key_id:
  secret_access_key:

production:
  bucket: <name>-production
  access_key_id:
  secret_access_key:

Step 4: Rewrite your Paperclip Model

# app/models/somemodel.rb
  has_attached_file :photo,
     :storage => :s3,
     :s3_credentials => "#{Rails.root}/config/s3.yml",
     :path => "/:style/:id/:filename",
     :s3_host_name => "s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com"

As part of the move from aws/s3 to aws-sdk, there’s no longer a need to do interpolate for non-US buckets. The new :s3_host_name parameter is supposed to remove that need. The parameter :url hence is now no longer needed.

Step 5: ???

Step 6: Profit

And you’re done!

Again, I hope you guys find this useful. If you do, please pay it forward by sharing your own guides to getting things to work. You have no idea how incredibly useful they are to others.

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