My Experience With Ralis

​

​
For my third project I choose to make a Real Estate web page. One of the features I wanted to include was the ability to upload pictures . This was a big learning experience, I have a new respect for uploading images.
​

Getting Started

Once I knew I wanted to upload images I stated to look around for different ways to do so. I came across a gem named shrine which can be found here https://shrinerb.com/. This is were the hard part came in. Aside from installing the gem like normal, there was a second step that needed to be done to allow images to be rendered. I needed to install https://imagemagick.org/index.php ImageMagick onto my system. After this I was able to add images.
​

Using Shrine

There was a slight learning curve to using this gem. There are pages upon pages of doucments on different ways to use this gem. To get started I follwed these steps : "Add Shrine to the Gemfile and write an initializer which sets up the storage and loads integration for your persistence library:"

require "shrine"
require "shrine/storage/file_system"

Shrine.storages = { 
  cache: Shrine::Storage::FileSystem.new("public", prefix: "uploads/cache"), # temporary 
  store: Shrine::Storage::FileSystem.new("public", prefix: "uploads"),       # permanent 
}

Shrine.plugin :sequel # or :activerecord 
Shrine.plugin :cached_attachment_data # for retaining the cached file across form redisplays 
Shrine.plugin :restore_cached_data # re-extract metadata when attaching a cached file 
Shrine.plugin :rack_file # for non-Rails apps 

Next
​$ rails generate migration add_image_data_to_photos image_data:text

Now you want to make an uploader class like such

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  include ImageUploader::Attachment(:image) # adds an `image` virtual attribute 
end

For the form you need

form_for @photo do |f|
  f.hidden_field :image, value: @photo.cached_image_data
  f.file_field :image
  f.submit
end

And in your controller you want to require photo and permit image

class PhotosController < ApplicationController
  def create
    Photo.create(photo_params)
              end

  private

  def photo_params
    params.require(:photo).permit(:image)
  end
end

Closing

After following these steps you should have a working image uploader. You can check out my project here. Github