Capistrano and Uploaded Documents

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have an application I'm working on which allows me to upload files. The files are stored somewhere in the public directory so that they can be accessed directly. When I deploy an update with Capistrano, I 'lose' the files because of the current symlink points to the new checked out version.

Before I start working on a solution, has anyone else already solved this problem?

Stephen Gerstacker

2

Stephen,

If you store your uploaded files in public/system they won’t get overwritten with every code update.

Hammed

3

Yup.

put them in the shared dir, or any other dir outside of those releases dir. You can do this to your app like so:

create a directory in the deploy_to/shared dir, let's call it file_storage. Copy all your current files to this /shared/file_storage dir. now, remove the dir and create a symlink to it.

Now, to make sure that dir gets symlinked everytime during a depoy, create a task called after_update_code. In it, symlink the dir, like so:

desc "Tasks to execute after code update" task :after_update_code, :roles => [:app, :db] do # uploaded file record storage run "rm -Rf #{release_path}/file_storage" run "ln -s #{uploaded_files_path}/file_storage #{release_path}/file_storage" end

The rm removes the symlink and the ln -s relinks it back.

in this case, uploaded_files_path could be: deploy_to/shared/files or just a dir /upload on your server root.

hope this helps. cheers!

4

Thanks, that worked like a charm.

Stephen Gerstacker