Uploaded files disappear during new push?

Question

I have paperclip working just fine where I can upload files to my site, but whenever I make updates and push a new version of the site all of the files I uploaded via paperclip seem to disappear (All the information that was entered into the database remains though).

I assume the problem is that I haven't pulled the files from the live version of the site, but whenever I do a git pull it tells me everything is up to date. Is there anyway for me to download the files I've uploaded. (I would prefer to not use amazon S3 to store the files currently)

Answer 1

The files you have uploaded are stored at public folder. And public folder is not deployed with code, so your files are assuming to be disappeared.

If, you use amazon S3, then images will be stored at s3 and it will provide a dynamic url to access images. Then, you will be able to access images properly.

You can also save images at dropbox. In this application images are stored at dropbox and running on heroku. You may take the referance:

https://github.com/aman199002/Album-App # open source app to store albums(at dropbox).

http://album-app.herokuapp.com #Url of the application running on heroku.

Answer 2

When you deploy your application to Heroku, your pushed code is compiled into what is called a slug - this is essentially an archive of everything needed to run your application. When you restart or scale your application your original slug is then copied to be run. However, it's a readonly slug so when you upload files they exist on the dyno that received them so if you had multiple dynos your files wouldn't exist across them and they then do not persist when your application is restarted or you push new code nor is there any way to retrieve them.

Your only way to perist files on Heroku is to use an external cloud storage solution like Amazon S3, Rackspace files etc - fortunately it's very simple to have Paperclip use S3 for it's storage mechanism - there's a tutorial at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/paperclip-s3