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I want to use Heroku for hosting my Ruby on Rails project. It will involve lots of file uploads, mostly images. Can I host and serve that static files on Heroku or is it wiser to use services like Amazon S3. What is Your opinion on that approach ? What are my options for hosting that static files on Heroku ?
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Storing static files elsewhere is crucial for Heroku apps since dynos have an ephemeral filesystem. Whenever you replace a dyno or when it restarts, which happens daily, all files that aren't part of your application's slug are lost. Use a storage solution like S3 to offload the storage of static files from your app.
Files are uploaded directly to the cloud from your user's browser, without passing through your application. Adding direct uploads to your app allows you to offload the storage of static files from your app. This is crucial on Heroku, because your app's dynos have an ephemeral filesystem.
Collectstatic during builds When a Django application is deployed to Heroku, $ python manage.py collectstatic --noinput is run automatically during the build. A build will fail if the collectstatic step is not successful.
To deploy your app to Heroku, use the git push command to push the code from your local repository's main branch to your heroku remote. For example: $ git push heroku main Initializing repository, done.
To answer your question, Heroku's "ephemeral filesystem" will not serve as a storage for static uploads. Heroku is an app server, period. You have to plug into data storage elsewhere.
From Heroku's spec:
Ephemeral filesystem
Each dyno gets its own ephemeral filesystem, with a fresh copy of the most recently deployed code. During the dyno’s lifetime its running processes can use the filesystem as a temporary scratchpad, but no files that are written are visible to processes in any other dyno and any files written will be discarded the moment the dyno is stopped or restarted. For example, this occurs any time a dyno is replaced due to application deployment and approximately once a day as part of normal dyno management.
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Heroku is a great option for RoR in my opinion. I have used it personally and ran to the problem that has been mentioned here already (you can't store anything in Heroku's filesystem). I therefore used S3 following this tutorial: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3
Hope it helps!
PD: Make sure not to store the S3 credentials on any file, but rather create variables as described here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/config-vars I used to have them on a file and long story short someone gained access to my Amazon account and my account was billed several thousands of dollars (just from a couple of days). The Amazon staff was kind enough to waive those. Just something to have in mind.
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