--- title: Upload Product images with ActiveStorage - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 15 slug: upload-product-images-with-activestorage-creatorplatform-xyz-part-15 published_at: 2022-09-20 10:19:40 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:09 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, we'll install and set up ActiveStorage to upload files. I encounter a confusing bug related to how active storage was installed client side, and I go through my debugging steps, hopefully, those are helpful! We'll also talk about how to add variants to images. 00:00 Introduction 00:27 Install Active Storage and image_processing gem 01:39 Add reference to the attachment to the Product model 02:56 Add file upload input to product form 04:12 Incorrectly add active storage client side 05:24 Encounter ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier::InvalidSignature bug 06:43 Fix bug 07:16 Add image_tag to display the uploaded image 07:58 Add variants to photo 09:15 Conclusion 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: 761 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/upload-product-images-with-activestorage-creatorplatform-xyz-part-15 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihGRv-0E6K0 youtube_id: ihGRv-0E6K0 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ihGRv-0E6K0 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ihGRv-0E6K0/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Upload Product images with ActiveStorage - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 15 *Published: September 20, 2022* *Views: 761* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihGRv-0E6K0) [![Upload Product images with ActiveStorage - CreatorPlatform.xyz - Part 15](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ihGRv-0E6K0/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihGRv-0E6K0) ## Description In this episode, we'll install and set up ActiveStorage to upload files. I encounter a confusing bug related to how active storage was installed client side, and I go through my debugging steps, hopefully, those are helpful! We'll also talk about how to add variants to images. 00:00 Introduction 00:27 Install Active Storage and image_processing gem 01:39 Add reference to the attachment to the Product model 02:56 Add file upload input to product form 04:12 Incorrectly add active storage client side 05:24 Encounter ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier::InvalidSignature bug 06:43 Fix bug 07:16 Add image_tag to display the uploaded image 07:58 Add variants to photo 09:15 Conclusion 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's up welcome back we are building out a creator platform where creators can sell products and in this episode you're going to learn all about handling file uploads we're going to talk about uploading an image a product photo for our products so right now we are creating these products we can add a new product and what we want to do is add a new button here that will allow us to upload an image of that product so we're going to start from scratch here we're going to say rails uh active storage colon install now in order for this to work uh i i've also installed the vips uh package or the vips homebrew thing so vips uh so you can say brew install vips if you're on mac if or if you use homebrew if you have some other system you might need some sort of image processing binary that works with the image processing gem so i'm going to say bundle add image processing that's going to add the image processing gem to our bundle we're going to use that for doing things like resizing and cleaning up the images as they come in all right so we've got active storage installed and what that does or what that did was it created a migration for us so we can say rails db migrate uh colon status and that'll tell us whether or not we've run it because i can't actually remember so it says uh no it's down we haven't actually run it so we can say rails db colon migrate that will run the migration and that will create a couple different tables active storage blobs attachments and variant records those are going to be used in a polymorphic way so if we go to our product model we can actually just say down here has one attached photo and that's really all we need to do we don't actually have to change the product model or the product table at all and it's going to use active storage in a polymorphic way all right so the next thing we want to do is so as we're working our way up the stack one of the approaches i like to take when building a feature sort of start at the database work your way through having like the model set up then go to the controller make sure the controller's all set up then go to the view so let's do that today and we'll jump into the products controller and add photo to our allowed product params because those are going to be passed in when we create our new product recall that we're after we create a product and save it in the database we're going to send that over to stripe and at this point when we first create the images we're going to be storing them locally so by default we're going to use the local disk for storage and so our files are not going to be publicly accessible so we won't actually be able to send them to stripe just yet but in the next episode we'll get around to that okay so now we've got our model we've got our controller let's move our way to the view so we're going to open up the product new view and recall that we were using tailwind ui the forms layout for tailwind ui we were using this sort of stacked layout so let's find our stacked layout and there was an image or a photo upload sort of ui that we could just copy here so let's drop that in right below the description so we're going to say we now have this new thing that we want whoops all right and this is going to be the product photo cool let's go take a look at what this looks like so if we jump over to our page we've got this photo label it has an image it kind of looks like an avatar that's not what our product is ultimately going to look like so let's actually just remove that entire sort of svg span and then let's also remove this flex item center situation and the button rather than having any of that margin on the left we don't actually need any of that now instead of being a button we also want to change this to a file type so we're going to change the input to type file and that is sort of like a standalone thing that we can do all right so now we have this file input where we can select a file that's great but what we want to do in what active record or active storage allows us to do is take an image and upload it client-side to wherever it's going to ultimately be so there are some javascript utilities that we're going to use so let's now jump into application js and we're going to say import at rails active storage and that's going to set up the active storage like import the active storage package then we want to say activestorage.start and that will fire up all the javascript that we need now going back to our form here by default this file doesn't have any names we need to give it a name and that's going to be product photo that way the controller will know what the key is for this when we're saving it on the product we also want to add a data attribute here that will allow us to upload client sites we're going to say data direct upload url is equal to this thing that rails gives us called rails direct uploads url okay so i think that is looking pretty good let's take a look here and see if this is actually gonna work so we're gonna do test test we'll pick um a thing here we've got like a little product image give it some numbers click create product active support message verifier invalid signature i think we need to restart the server because we installed some gems and did some new stuff here so let's restart that and then refresh we'll go through the flow once more so we're going to come back over here refresh test test pick a file enter in some amount click create product active support message verifier invalid signature so i'm not actually sure what's going on here so i'm gonna go back over here dashboard i'm gonna keep open the terminal down here just to see if there's any errors active storage is okay so here we go here we go active storage is not defined so we started using this active storage javascript library but we didn't actually install it so inside of application js we are using import active storage here but we didn't actually install that so i'm going to say npm install active rails active storage that will add the package now we can say bin dev again come back over to the client side okay so now that we have that installed we should be able to say test test uh choose a file pick the file one two three boom create the product is this still failing do we still have an error hmm oh okay we need to say import star as active storage from okay now our javascript error is gone we can say test test we can pick our file let's see if this works one two three four create product all right we were redirected to the product page so now if we open up rails console we should be able to look at product.last and we can see that product.last.photo should have an active storage attachment and it does so one thing that's really cool is on our product show page so if we go to the product show page here right above our checkout button we could say let's create an image tag with at product.photo and that should create an image tag for us here all right so it's got our in our image that we uploaded build and learn this is our podcast build and learn.dev head over and check it out if you haven't already it's uh my friend colin and i hang out and just visit about tech and building our lives and it's it's quite fun all right so we've got um the images uploading we can show it here but one of the things that we might want to do is sort of limit or have different a couple different options for the sizes and the way that those are defined is as variants on the product model so down here when we say has one attached photo we can say do photo now we can say photo.variant give it a name like thumb and then we can specify a bunch of different arguments that will apply to the photo for that specific variant so we can say something here like resize to limit and then pass that an array so for a thumbnail it might be like 100 by 100 and for a medium image it might be resize to 400 400. these are the two that i think we're going to need for now and what we can do is use these inside of our view by saying dot representation thumb and if we refresh now that will give us the thumb representation if we want the medium representation we can say medium so now we should have two images here one is the thumb one is the medium representation and so those are kind of like different sizes and what happens is when your browser requests the image it is redirected through a proxy that will lazily actually apply that transition and then also cache it so you can do some really fancy things there so that was that's kind of like start to finish all the things that you might need to upload an image and this is just working with it locally so in the next episode we're going to go through setting up aws s3 in order to work with our ruby on rails application so that we can upload these images to s3 so that they're publicly available and then we can use those as part of our stripe products when we redirect to checkout so thanks so much for watching this was a really great introduction to active storage really appreciate your time and attention and we'll see in the next one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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