Migrating Paperclip Image Assets from GCP Bucket to AWS S3 + Cloudfront

Migrating the storage layer for Rails Paperclip images need not be a hassle or lead to downtime.

Photo by İsmail Enes Ayhan in Unsplash

Introduction

Paperclip is an attachment management library for Rails that despite being deprecated is still widely used. In one of my recent projects working with Solidus, we had to migrate our image assets from Google Cloud Storage to Amazon Web Services S3 with a Cloudfront CDN. I noticed a lack of guides on how to accomplish this so I will outline it below.

Migration

1. Prepare Code to Work with S3 + Cloudfront

In your environment configuration files (usually named development.rb, production.rb, etc) change your existing Paperclip configuration code to the one below:

config.paperclip_defaults = {
  storage: :s3,
  s3_region: ENV['AWS_REGION'], 
  s3_credentials: {
    access_key_id: ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY'],
    secret_access_key: ENV['AWS_SECRET_KEY']
  },
  s3_protocol: :https,
  s3_host_alias: ENV['CLOUDFRONT_DOMAIN'].gsub('https://', ''),
  use_accelerate_endpoint: true,
  bucket: ENV['AWS_S3_IMAGE_BUCKET'],
  s3_headers: {
    'Cache-Control' => 'max-age=315576000'
  }
}