Rails 6 carrierwave production settings for digitalocean spaces with a custom subdomain

May 08, 2020

Hello,

I recently worked on both Active Storage and CarrierWave to store user uploaded files and decided to use CW on my site. (Maybe i will tell why i choose CW over Active Storage in a different article)

I'm using digitalocean spaces since it is basicly cheaper when you don't need a huge storage size. I also want to use custom subdomain for my stored files so i don't end up messy urls for my file urls. I don't know why but messy urls look dirty to me. Like developer doesn't even care. What a shame.... Coulnd't find a good example for carrierwave settings to use in digitalocean spaces and wanted to share this info myself. I assume you are installed carrierwave before hand.

TODO

Create your digitalocean space.
Create a subdomain and attach SSL to it within Digitalocean form. It can be done with couple of clicks.

CDN subdomain

Go to API panel and create a key. Store your key info somewhere safe.
Give folder permissons for your domain.

Install necessary gems to use carrierwave with digitalocean.

gem "fog-aws" # storage for AWS S3 digitalocean

Go to your uploader.rb file, in my case it is app/uploaders/image_uploader.rb.

# storage :file. Change this to `fog`
  storage :fog

This is the config/initializers/carrierwave.rb file. This file configures carrierwave to use digitalocean spaces for your website in production.

CarrierWave.configure do |config|
    config.fog_credentials = {
        provider:                 'AWS',                                              # required
        aws_access_key_id:        'your-key-id',                                      # required unless using use_iam_profile
        aws_secret_access_key:    'your-secret-key',                                  # required unless using use_iam_profile
        region:                   'fra1',                                             # optional, default are different from aws.
        host:                     'fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com',                      # optional, defaults to nil
        endpoint:                 'https://fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com' 
    }
    config.fog_directory  = 'nameofyourspacesfolder'                                  # required
    config.asset_host     = "https://sub.domain.com"
    config.fog_attributes = { cache_control: "public, max-age=#{365.days.to_i}" }     # optional, defaults to {}
end

config.asset_host is doing the custom domain job here. Also be careful about region here. It is different from aws defaults.

That should do it.

Best Regards,

Tuna