paperclip working in development but not working in production?

Question

I'm pretty new to rails and seem to be having an issue with the paperclip gem. I installed the gem and it works well in development (localhost:3000) but when I'm running it on the heroku server, for some reason it does not want to attach files, and the app breaks (error 500 page).

Here is the process i ran... I pushed my file to heroku, heroku ran rake db:migrate (to add paperclip migrations), and then I ran heroku restart (to restart the app with new migrations). This did not seem to help.

Here is the code that I have for paperclip:

user.rb model:

  has_attached_file :avatar, 
                    :styles => {:small => "70x70>"},
                    :url  => "/users/:attachment/:id/:style/:basename.:extension",
                    :path => ":rails_root/public/users/:attachment/:id/:style/:basename.:extension"
  validates_attachment_size :avatar, :less_than => 500.kilobytes
  validates_attachment_content_type :avatar, :content_type => ['image/jpeg', 'image/png']

edit_form.html.haml view:

  = form_for (@user || User.new), :html => { :multipart => true } do |f|
  ...    
  .profile_picture.text_field
    = image_tag current_profile.avatar.url(:small)
    %br
    = f.file_field :avatar

Again, for some reason it runs great in development, but breaks down in production. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated... I just cant seem to figure this out and it's pretty frustrating. Thank you so much for your time and any help!

Answer 1

In your model.

has_attached_file :picture, 
                   :styles => {:large => "275x450>"},
                   :storage => :s3, 
                   :s3_credentials => "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/s3.yml",
                   :path => "appname/:attachment/:style/:id.:extension"

In s3.yml in your config dir:

    development:
      bucket: bucketname
      access_key_id: key
      secret_access_key: key

    production:
      bucket: bucketname
      access_key_id: key
      secret_access_key: key

Then go signup for a bucket at Amazon S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Answer 2

You could be having a few problems. However, the first is that you can not write to the file system on Heroku. You will have to implement a different storage mechanism such as s3. You can read about this limitation here: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/read-only-filesystem