---
title: AWS S3 Uploads with Ruby on Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 16
slug: aws-s3-uploads-with-ruby-on-rails-creatorplatform-xyz-part-16
published_at: 2022-09-21 10:19:44 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:09 +0000
summary: 
description: Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6F722u-R6IJfBrIRx3a2SBkAL4vUp2p  Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/creators.dev/  Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjav_dev  #rubyonrails #ruby #rails
tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, ruby on rails, active record, ruby on rails tutorial]
views: 3875
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/aws-s3-uploads-with-ruby-on-rails-creatorplatform-xyz-part-16
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbiXR7VGWYo
youtube_id: wbiXR7VGWYo
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/wbiXR7VGWYo
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wbiXR7VGWYo/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# AWS S3 Uploads with Ruby on Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 16

*Published: September 21, 2022*
*Views: 3875*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbiXR7VGWYo)

[![AWS S3 Uploads with Ruby on Rails - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 16](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wbiXR7VGWYo/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbiXR7VGWYo)

## Description

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6F722u-R6IJfBrIRx3a2SBkAL4vUp2p 
Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/creators.dev/ 
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cjav_dev

#rubyonrails #ruby #rails

## Transcript

hey what&#39;s up welcome back in this episode you&#39;re going to see how to upload files to aws s3 we&#39;ve already got file uploading working with our rails application if you haven&#39;t seen that episode head over and take a look and the goal the end goal here is that we can create images for our products as part of this creator platform and we want those images to end up on stripe checkout so we want to pass them ultimately over to the stripe checkout flow which we&#39;re going to do by creating publicly accessible urls with ngrok it&#39;s going to be a fun episode so we&#39;ve got image uploading already working but it&#39;s not going to s3 so the first thing we need to do is install the aws s3 gems we&#39;re going to say bundle add aws sdk s3 and this will add that gem to our gem file now active storage comes with this storage.yaml thing that configures how you interact with amazon or any of the other storage providers there&#39;s amazon you can put stuff in gcp or azure or you can even mirror between several different services so what we&#39;re going to do is go through and i&#39;m going to walk through the entire process of setting up your s3 bucket because i think that part is actually the most tricky part so at the end of the day we need an access key a secret access key the region where our bucket is and then the name of the bucket and by default here this suggests maybe we do like the name of the bucket dash and then a an environment so let&#39;s log into the aws console so you can go to like i don&#39;t know it just if you search for like aws console there should be something at the top the aws management console alright so we&#39;re going to log back in you may need to log in now you want to go to s3 and the very first thing we&#39;re going to do is create a new bucket so i&#39;m going to click on create bucket here and the bucket in this case let&#39;s call it creators let&#39;s say creators development and we&#39;re going to put this in east us east one so now we&#39;re going to say we don&#39;t want any of this public access stuff enabled just keep everything disabled for now keep all the defaults and just create a bucket with a name in a location that&#39;s near you so now we have this creator&#39;s development bucket and it&#39;s in us east one the next step is we want to go to iam this is for our access management so we&#39;re going to go to iam and we&#39;re going to create a brand new user so we&#39;re going to go to iam click on users and say add new user the name of this user is going to be like creators active storage agent i don&#39;t know it doesn&#39;t really matter what you call this as long as you have a specific user that has an access key for programmatic access the permissions we&#39;re going to attach directly to a specific permission of some s3 full access so we&#39;re going to check that box and say we don&#39;t need any tags we&#39;re going to review this this looks good okay we&#39;re going to create the user and at this point we&#39;re not we now have an access id so i&#39;m going to copy that and we want to store this in our credentials credentials rails credentials call and edit we&#39;re going to create a new section here called aws and this is going to be called access key id we&#39;re going to paste that in we&#39;re also going to add our secret access key and this secret access key is hidden so we&#39;re gonna copy that and paste it in um what i found is you actually need to wrap this in quotes sometimes depending on what your key if it has slashes sometimes it&#39;ll mess things up so i&#39;m going to call that good so i&#39;ve got my access key id and my secret access key those are both in my credentials saved away and we&#39;re good to go now if we open up our storage remember that when you set those credentials they need to match the names that are here so access key id and secret access key and aws as sort of that top level key all right so our region is our region for our bucket is what is it i think it&#39;s u.s east one right not usc&#39;s two yeah us east one so that&#39;s good now the name of the bucket is creators dash development so i should be able to just change this to creators and then the rails environment will be development okay the next thing we need to do is open up development.rb and set the active storage instead of the service being local i&#39;m going to set that to amazon now this is going to make it so that in development we should be uploading files to amazon so let&#39;s restart our server since we installed a new gem for the aws sdk we&#39;re going to jump over to our creator thing and go back and create a new product we&#39;re gonna create a new product give it an image here we&#39;re gonna say open give it some currency and we got status zero okay so if you get an error that says you you found some error storing the thing and it has some status here that&#39;s actually good because we can go to our logs and figure out what&#39;s wrong so we have some error it says s3 storage generated url for file at this key so if we grab this url we can see that the error is related to the signature it says signature does not match the request signature blah blah blah it&#39;s actually not related to the signature at all this is related to cores okay so in my experience this error this specific error was related to course so you need to go to the bucket go to permissions and scroll down to the course section so cross origin resource sharing we need to edit this and inside of the rails docs for active storage there is an example course configuration so you can copy that and paste it inside of our course stuff now this is going to only allow put requests instead of get requests it&#39;s also only allowing requests for example.com so what we want to do is make this star for now so that we can come from a couple different domains we&#39;ll go back over here to our creator platform refresh test test select the image that we want to upload 333 create product okay so now it has created the product and if we inspect this we should see that it is actually hosted on s3 now the source here is localhost 3000 slash and then like this representation right let&#39;s copy the url and then go over and use curl dash v and paste in that url so you&#39;ll notice that the response we get back is initially is going to be a 302 found okay so this is giving us a redirect back now the location of the underlying file is actually this creators development s3 bucket that lives on amazon but the file uh that or like the source for the file that we&#39;re seeing in uh in the source here is localhost so why does that matter that matters because when we send an image over to stripe stripe needs to have a publicly accessible url localhost 3000 is not publicly accessible and so what we&#39;re going to do is use ngrok so we&#39;re going to fire up ngrok on this cjav dev subdomain and now we should be able to browse to this like i don&#39;t know whatever if we go to like ngrok or cgevdev.ngrok.io we&#39;re going to see this error message and this is because by default now rails has a tool that prevents access from different domains whatever it&#39;s some security thing what we need to do is go into our application.rb and set config.hosts is equal to nil now if you know the list of hosts you can add them into this array but for now i&#39;m just going to remove that and i&#39;m going to restart the server so that we can just move along with our little demo here all right so we&#39;re back in action and now if we go to our dashboard we could go through the process of creating a product one last time and this product again will have the same image but the difference is when we look at and inspect where this image is hosted you&#39;ll notice that it&#39;s coming from c drive dev and groc.io and this is a publicly accessible url so this is a url that you could access from from stripe and so now what we can do is we can take this url and set that as the product image url so that when we go to checkout we actually see that image so let&#39;s go over to uh our products controller and walk through the flow of what&#39;s happening now so we&#39;re creating this product saving it to the database just as a side note we might actually just want to check like is the product valid if so make the api call to stripe to create the thing if that was successful then save the product otherwise you kind of end up with a bunch of funky sort of like in the middle products but whatever this is this is good enough for now now inside of the stripe product helper here we&#39;re initializing we&#39;re passing down that product from the database and we&#39;re also passing down the params that came in and what this allows us to do is to make an api call to stripe to create a stripe product now it turns out that stripe accepts a list of images right now product.photo is one of these active record attachment things and so what we probably want to do is say dot representation medium dot processed dot url so the medium representation of the photo is going to use that variant which is going to kind of like crop it a little bit potentially or like resize it not crop it&#39;s not going to crop it&#39;s going to resize it so that it fits within those maximum boundaries and then dot processed says give us the processed version of that and give us that url so we should be able to say something like dot representation medium dot url inside of inside of the terminal this rails console doesn&#39;t know that we set up variants yet so now we get back this url and that should give us the the medium variant of that image so what we can do now is we should be able to walk through the process now of creating a new product so let&#39;s create a new product we&#39;re gonna go to products add a product okay actually let&#39;s make it like build and learn ebook or something okay all right we&#39;re going to choose this file and we&#39;re going to give it the logo it will have a single currency and now when we click on checkout and we&#39;re redirected to stripe checkout it&#39;s going to use the image url from ncroc so that&#39;s super cool and now we can see the images inside of stripe checkout we can also go to our bucket inside of s3 and see that now there are or there should be some images here if we click on refresh yeah we can see a bunch of images are being uploaded we can drill into that and see all of the different objects or the the image objects okay so this is kind of steps all the steps you might need to get started uploading images to s3 and we talked about using ngrok as a way to surface this public url a couple things we might do before we go to production number one we need to go to productionrb and make sure that it&#39;s using the right uh storage sort of service we would set that to amazon we would also want to go create a bucket called creators dash production so we can keep our development and production buckets separate hopefully this was helpful thanks so much for watching and we will see you in the next one [Music]

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