Save fetched image from URL using Paperclip to Amazon S3

Question

I have a JSON snippet that I am fetching to save posts to Post model

It looks like this:

{
 "provider_url": "http://twitter.com", 
 "description": "Four more years. pic.twitter.com/bAJE6Vom", 
 "title": "Twitter / BarackObama: Four more years. http://t.co/bAJE6Vom", 
 "author_name": "BarackObama", "height": 532, "thumbnail_width": 150, "width": 800, 
"thumbnail_url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A7EiDWcCYAAZT1D.jpg:thumb", 
 "author_url": "http://twitter.com/BarackObama", "version": "1.0", 
"url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A7EiDWcCYAAZT1D.jpg:large", 
"provider_name": "Twitter", "type": "photo", "thumbnail_height": 150
 }

The image being saved is the original photo URL from the provider.

For example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A7EiDWcCYAAZT1D.jpg

I want to archive the image into my own Amazon S3 storage using Paperclip if possible.

I also have a Post column named backup_s3_url where I want to store my uploaded/duplicated image URL hosted by S3.

I tried to use open-uri still... But it's still getting the original image URL. I want to directly save the image from URL using paperclip.

def picture_from_url(url)
  self.photo = URI.parse(url)
end

But the code above doesn't work, FYI.

Any workarounds will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Send the json image as a base64 encoded string.
On Rails decode this and save to S3 with paperclip.

For my iOS app I send the base64 string to a virtual attribute on the Rails model and use "before_save" to set the real S3 attribute value to the decoded string.

class Media1 < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_save :set_custom_photo

  attr_accessor :phototmp


  has_attached_file :photo, 
    :styles => 
      { :thumb => '150x150#',
        :small => '100x100>',
        :large => '600x600>'},
     :storage => :s3,
     :s3_credentials => "#{Rails.root}/config/s3.yml",
     :s3_protocol => "https",
     :path => ":class/:id/:basename_:style.:extension",
     :url  => ":s3_eu_url"  


  validates_attachment_size :photo, :less_than => 5.megabytes
  validates_attachment_content_type :photo, :content_type => ['image/jpeg', 'image/png']


   def set_custom_photo
      data = StringIO.new(Base64.decode64(self.phototmp))
      data.class.class_eval { attr_accessor :original_filename, :content_type }
      data.original_filename = "mapimage.png"
      data.content_type = "image/png"

      self.photo = data
   end


end

Answer 2

Maybe these resources might be helpful:

Uploading from a url with paperclip: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4050758/2463468

Save to s3 with paperclip: https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip/wiki/Paperclip-with-Amazon-S3