In my last blog post I explained how to upload file via ajax. In that the file is store in the application server itself. But what if we want to store file in our s3 bucket. We can use aws-sdk gem to do it.

Add gem to Gemfile

# Gemfile
gem 'aws-sdk'

As usual after adding gem to Gemfile do bundle install.

Configure AWS

To authorize your app to access s3 bucket you can pass the key and secret to AWS#config method. To do this authorization on our application startup we can add a new file in config/initializers folder.

# config/initializers/s3.rb
AWS.config(
  :access_key_id => 'key',
  :secret_access_key => 'secret'
)

You can either specify your key and secret in s3.rb or load it from custom configuration file. The latter one is recommended.

Upload to s3

Now we have configured and authorized our application to access s3 buckets. Now we can start working on uploading files. Since uploading to s3 can be from any controller, I like to move the functionality to lib folder as a separate custom library.

#  lib/s3_store.rb
class S3Store
  BUCKET = "app-uploads".freeze

  def initialize file
    @file = file
    @s3 = AWS::S3.new
    @bucket = @s3.buckets[BUCKET]
  end

  def store
    @obj = @bucket.objects[filename].write(@file.tempfile, acl: :public_read)
    self
  end

  def url
    @obj.public_url.to_s
  end

  private
  
  def filename
    @filename ||= @file.original_filename.gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9_\.]/, '_')
  end
end

Now we have separate s3_store library to do task related to s3 bucket. Since our library is in lib folder, rails by default won’t load it. To reload the s3_store.rb in development we need to add lib folder to autoload paths. This will also ensure that rails will autoload our library and we don’t need to write a separate require for it.

ok, go ahead and use the library in our controller, to upload files to s3 bucket.

# app/controllers/some_controller.rb
def image
  begin
    image = S3Store.new(params[:upload][:image]).store
    #...
  rescue Exception => e
    #...
  end
end

Since we return self from store method, you can use image.url to get the public url of the file uploaded. This can be used to store to db for reference.