How do I reference images in my S3 bucket from local dev app?

Question

Please see: On Amazon S3 I'm able to give an individual object download rights but cannot for the entire bucket for the next evolution of this question.

I've got a bucket with all my images uploaded. I'm trying to access them via their url as instructed by https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3 . I of course want to make sure I can access them before I upload my latest changes to my live app. I've got the yml set up appropriately as far as I can tell, but the images are not loading when I visit the site running locally on WEBRICK. I have not made any changes to the AWS files in my rubygems directory. Here's an example of the reference I'm using to display the image:

<%= image_tag("https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/mybucket/someimage.jpg") %>

Can anyone provide me with some instructions? I know there are instructions for adding code to the included AWS files, but I cannot understand them enough to go in there and monkey around. Thanks.

I added the following to my bucket policy:

{
  "Id": "somepolicy",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "someid",
      "Action": [
        "s3:GetObject"
      ],
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::myapp/mykey",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": [
          "*"
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}

I am still unable to access the images. Is GetObject the appropriate action to allow?

Answer 1

You should be using the paperclip gem for image uploading. I know it doesn't seem necessary, but when it comes to allowing users to upload to disk, it's better to leave it to the professionals. (Why re-invent the wheel?).

With paperclip, you can do things like

User.profile_pic.url

or

User.images.first.image.url

I certainly think it's the way to go.

Answer 2

Paperclip is great solution for uploading and serving files but it sounds like you have already uploaded all of the content you intend to serve. This is a permissions issue with your S3 bucket.

Amazon Sample bucket policies:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/AccessPolicyLanguage_UseCases_s3_a.html

Answer 3

Big thanks to everyone that worked with me on this problem, especially @LarryMcKenzie. The problem is that you need to set file permissions on upload and there is no way to mass assign permissions to all objects in a bucket.

Solution: I reuploaded all of the images with the Open/Download flag set to true for everyone.