How to download an ephemeral file from Heroku Cedar

Question

I have a rails project hosted on Heroku Cedar that does the following:

• crawls daily newsfeed and store them into the database
• manually judge the feeds and classify them into categories
• use the judgments to build a classifier that automatically classifies new incoming feed
• iteratively improve the classification with additional judgments

The problem is that the classifier requires writing to a file. However, when I run the scripts on Heroku Cedar, it creates an ephemeral file that isn't permanent.

My questions are:

1. Is there a way to download the ephemeral file I created by running a script on Heroku?
2. What's a better way to handle situation like this?

Answer 1

In short No. You want to be storing any generated data in some sort of persistent file/data store. You should look at pushing these files to S3 or similar.