Uploading a file to a directory outside of RAILS ROOT with attachment_fu

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to use attachment_fu to upload files to a directory outside of the RAILS_ROOT. I want the files to be saved to ~/APP_NAME/uploads/ so that they can be approved/rejected before becoming publicly available. I've tried the following configuration for has_attachment:

has_attachment  :storage => :file_system,
                :path_prefix => "~/APP_NAME/uploads/",
                :max_size => 5.megabytes

Unfortunately, this configuration simply creates the ~/APP_NAME/uploads/ directory structure in RAILS_ROOT. Any way to save the file outside of RAILS_ROOT?

Answer 1

This probably isn't an Attachment-Fu issue, but rather how Ruby handles File I/O as well as how files are stored in Unix.

So for instance if your app lives in, say, ~/Users/ron/APP_NAME

If you change the above code:

:path_prefix => "~/APP_NAME/uploads/"

To:

:path_prefix => "../#{RAILS_ROOT}/uploads"

The files would be stored in a folder called "uploads" in ~/Users/ron/uploads. The "../" means one directory above the current Rails root. If you want to go up two directories, it would be "../../" and so on.

But that only addresses hierarchical navigation. If you wanted to tell Attachment-Fu to store files in a hardcoded directory in your filesystem, you could give it a file path such as "~/Users/ron/APP_NAME/uploads", but keep in mind hardcoding in a file path this way is brittle and could be a pain point in the future should your file storage requirements change.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

I found an alternative method that suits me better than using relative pathnames. I added a method called full_filename to my attachment class:

class attachment < ActiveRecord::Base
    def full_filename
       return  "/Users/ron/attachments/#{id}.#{file_format}"
    end
end

Answer 3

I like your solution of overriding full_filename.

I can call super in it, allowing me to retain attachment_fu's index-based path name components (e.g. 0000/0001, etc), and then I use gsub to substitute the path components that need to be altered.