Rails Heroku Paperclip Files disapperad

Question

I'm developing a webapp with Rails, Paperclip and Heroku but since my last commit were I just added Google Analytics the most of the uploaded images disappeared! That's my link: http://wo42.herokuapp.com/ I don't know why that happened oO

Answer 1

The actual issue here is that when you push to Heroku your application is re-deployed, and that won't be to the same machine that you were on before (it could be anywhere at any time).

Therefore, if you were uploading images to your local dynos filesystem, only that dyno had access to those files. When you deployed, that dyno would have been destroyed and a new one created.

This is why Heroku recommend that you use a persistent backing service such as S3 to store your uploaded and persisted files. This sort of service is available to all dynos and persists across deploys.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3

Answer 2

Heroku never used to let you write to their file-system although they have recently introduced something calld the ephemeral file-system - this article explains it. Best option is to use S3.