ActiveStorage in Production

    Joy of Rails is a Rails application that uses ActiveStorage to manage media attachments, including screenshots of code snippets.

    Updated:

    Joy of Rails uses DigitalOcean Spaces for image storage in production.

    DigitalOcean Spaces are S3-compatible so technically not much different from using Amazon S3. I chose DigitalOcean Spaces because Joy of Rails is already using DigitalOcean for the virtual private server to host the application. That keeps things simpler in my mind.

    The DigitalOcean interface makes it pretty easy to set up. This tutorial, although a bit older, is still relevant. It provides all the info you would need to go from "zero-to-DigitalOcean" for ActiveStorage.

    As far as Rails configuration goes, here are the key bits:

    A section in config/storage.yml to set credentials to DigitalOcean.

    config/storage.yml 
    digitalocean:
  service: S3
  access_key_id: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :access_key) %>
  secret_access_key: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :secret) %>
  bucket: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :bucket) %>
  endpoint: https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com
  region: us-east-1

    A section in in my encrypted credentials file to store the access key, secret, and bucket name I generated in the DigitalOcean interface.

    config/environments/production.yml.enc
    digitalocean:
  access_key: DOxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  secret: aaaabbbbccccddddeeeeffffxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  bucket: my-bucket-name

    A setting in config/environments/production.rb to point ActiveStorage to DigitalOcean.

    config/environments/production.rb 
    # Store uploaded files on digitalocean (see config/storage.yml).

      config.active_storage.service = :digitalocean