uploading a file to a website with ruby/rails

Question

I am building a rails app to test our flagship product (also web based). The problem is that part of the testing requires using the production app's web interface to upload files. So what i need to do is have the rails app upload these files to the production application (not rails). Is there a way to have rails post the file to the production application (like the browser posts the file to the production app)?

Answer 1

Sure, use the net/http library...

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/http/rdoc/classes/Net/HTTP.html

but it would appear that it is missing multipart encoding, so check out this other article

http://kfahlgren.com/blog/2006/11/01/multipart-post-in-ruby-2/

Check out this similar question

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184178/ruby-how-to-post-a-file-via-http-as-multipartform-data

Answer 2

You might wanna check out the Paperclip plugin. Very good for uploading images. Might work for other formats too.

Answer 3

If you just need to upload files, I think it's pointless to use a plugin for this. File upload is very, very simple.

class Upload < ActiveRecord::Base
  before_create :set_filename
  after_create :store_file
  after_destroy :delete_file

  validates_presence_of :uploaded_file

  attr_accessor :uploaded_file

  def link
    "/uploads/#{CGI.escape(filename)}"
  end

  private

  def store_file
    File.open(file_storage_location, 'w') do |f|
      f.write uploaded_file.read
    end
  end

  def delete_file
    File.delete(file_storage_location)
  end

  def file_storage_location
    File.join(Rails.root, 'public', 'uploads', filename)
  end

  def set_filename
    self.filename = random_prefix + uploaded_file.original_filename
  end

  def random_prefix
    Digest::SHA1.hexdigest(Time.now.to_s.split(//).sort_by {rand}.join)
  end
end

Then, your form can look like this:

<% form_for @upload, :multipart => true do |f| %>
  <%= f.file_field :uploaded_file %>
  <%= f.submit "Upload file" %>
<% end %>

I think the code is pretty much self explanatory, so I won't explain it ; )