ruby on rails, jruby, aws, ec2, exalead

Way back last November when I first blogged about Paperclip I included a brief mention of hiding files behind a controller rather than simply putting them in the public directory for all to see. Since then I’ve noticed that the question of how to actually do this has come up regularly over on Rails Forum and a couple of weeks ago I had to figure out how to update some of our code to protect assets that we had migrated from local file system to Amazon S3 storage. So I figured it’s probably a worthwhile technique to share.

We’ve spent the last few weeks working on a new Rails app for a film and photography site and, as you might expect from my recent posts, we’re using Paperclip to handle file uploads.

Without any more effort than a script/install of Paperclip we get thumbnailing of images and PDFs, but what about thumbnailing the video files that will be uploaded to the site? Enter FFmpeg.

For well over a year now attachment_fu has been my plugin of choice for adding file uploads to our Rails applications, but recently my fellow WebFellas have been raving about Paperclip from the clever guys at thoughtbot. As I’ve just started yet another new project I figured it was time to take Paperclip for a spin.