Ruby Tutorials

It is one of these joyous revelations. Today I was having a discussion with a fellow developer on attachment_fu. I am very much a fan of plugins, this means less work for me. In which case I win. He, however, refrained from using attachment_fu. Instead writing his own file upload mechanism. This seemed strange to me and I asked him why. He then correctly pointed out that with attachment_fu he was unable to save files outside his application root directory.

So why is this a problem? Everyone I know is using Capistrano as their preferred way of deploying. The way Capistrano does subsequent deploys is by linking the new release to the current directory and unlinking the old one. Everything in the old release suddenly becomes unavailible! And that includes the files by attachment_fu. And article on Almost Effortless pointed this out several months ago and posted a solution in the form of a Capistrano recipe. But who wants to write their own recipes?

However I seemed to remember seeing a @system@ directory on our live server. And there is! In Capistrano 2.0 every public directory has a link to a system directory which is unaffected by deploys. How well these Capistrano people thought this out. Brilliant. Now it is only a matter of using the :path_prefix argument.

has_attachment :content_type => :image,
:storage => :file_system,
:path_prefix => 'public/system',
:max_size => 500.kilobytes,
:resize_to => '320x200>',
:thumbnails => { :thumb => '100x100>' }

Set svn propset svn:ignore "*" public/system/ and you are ready to go!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.