Amazon’s S3 european buckets and Paperclip in Rails 3

Paperclip issue with Amazon’s S3 european buckets – solved

Finally I have found a solution for the well known problem of thoughtbot’s Paperclip and Amazon’s S3 EU buckets.

Paperclip configuration for Amazon S3

First of all you have to define the has_attached_file class method inside your class. I have something like:

class Photo  < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_attached_file :img, :styles => {
            :thumb => ["35x35#", :jpg],
            :medium => ["150x", :jpg],
            :original => ["650x", :jpg]
    },
    :storage => :s3,
    :s3_credentials => "#{Rails.root}/config/amazon_s3.yml",
    :s3_protocol => "https",
    :path => ":class/:id/:basename_:style.:extension",
    :bucket => "your_bucket_name_here",
    :url  => ":s3_eu_url"
end

Paperclip initializer to handle Amazon S3 url’s

Next create an initializer (/config/initializers/paperclip.rb) and inside define a Paperclip interpolation for the :s3_eu_url (paperclip uses this to construct the url of the image when you display it).
```
Paperclip.interpolates(:s3_eu_url) do |att, style|
    "#{att.s3_protocol}://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/#{att.bucket_name}/#{att.path(style)}"
end
```

AWS patch for setting the correct Amazon’s S3 EU url

Now that you have correctly defined the urls that Paperclip generates, you have to explicitly change the default host that Paperclip connects to when you uploading an image to Amazon’s S3. Well, this is not a Paperclip issue at all. Paperclip uses the infamous AWS::S3 when it connects to Amazon, so the issue comes from misconfiguring the AWS. Inside the same initializer put the following code
```
module AWS
    module S3
        DEFAULT_HOST = "s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"
    end
end
```

Now you have a fully working Amazon S3 backed image (and not only) uploading system working in Rails 3.0

13 Comments → Amazon’s S3 european buckets and Paperclip in Rails 3

Kevin March 16, 2011 at 8:59 am

Great, I’ll be looking to give this solution a try over the weekend. I had recently switched back to a US bucket because I had other things to develop.

Reply ↓

Gerry March 19, 2011 at 12:15 pm

Nice!Give it a try and let me know if that worked for you.

Reply ↓

Jules March 16, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Dude! – This works.

Thank you so much.

Took a bit of finding on google after playing around with a few other solutions. Let’s hope this gets up the google rankings so other people can find it.

Reply ↓

Gerry March 19, 2011 at 12:17 pm

Glad I helped Jules!

Reply ↓

Axel April 8, 2011 at 9:41 am

Hi Gerry,

thx for this beautiful page:) This is good stuff and my site is working well with EU-Buckets…

Have a good time..

Axel

Reply ↓

Claire April 13, 2011 at 6:06 am

Hi Gerry,

Thanks it really works.
I also tried adding this to the environment instead.

AWS::S3::DEFAULT_HOST.replace s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

– Claire

Reply ↓

Martin Seroczynski April 19, 2011 at 3:33 pm

I’ve created a simple gist for these changes to put them in initializer.

https://gist.github.com/928462

Reply ↓

Max May 6, 2011 at 6:29 pm

Excellent post Gerry! Thanks for the gist Martin, it works perfect!

Reply ↓

Igor Alexandrov November 14, 2011 at 8:35 am

I have created storage module for Paperclip that uses official ‘aws-sdk’ gem. It supports all S3 locations, and new features like Server Side Encryption.

Works well, using it in production projects myself. https://github.com/igor-alexandrov/paperclip-aws

Reply ↓