I'm using the carrierwave gem to upload files.
I have built a system for users to flag images as inappropriate and for admins to remove the images. From what I can tell, calling destroy on the image will only remove the path name from the table.
Is there a way to have carrierwave actually remove the file itself? Or should rails automatically remove the file when I destroy the image path?
Not sure what CarrierWave offers for this, but you could use FileUtils
in the Ruby standard library with an ActiveRecord callback.
For instance,
require 'FileUtils'
before_destroy :remove_hard_image
def remove_hard_image
FileUtils.rm(path_to_image)
end
Sidenote: This code is from memory.
Like @mu_is_too_short said, you can use File#delete.
Here's a code snippet you could use as a helper with a little tweaking in your rails app.
def remove_file(file)
File.delete(file)
end
or if you just have the filename stored in file
def remove_file(file)
File.delete("./path/to/#{file}")
end
If one wants to delete a file but does not want to specify the full filename you can use the below.
Can also be used to delete many files or all files in a directory with a specific extension...
file = Rails.root.join("tmp", "foo*")
or
file = Rails.root.join("tmp", ".pdf")
files = Dir.glob(file) #will build an array of the full filepath & filename(s)
files.each do |f|
File.delete(f)
end