When developing a rails application using paperclip with S3 for storage, you don’t want to literally uploading files to S3. Your app development will be slow and you have to be online to do it, that’s cumbersome. This is where fakes3 gem can help, and here’s how you set it up.

Basically fakes3 create a local server to act as if it’s S3 server, and you set your rails app (or paperclip to be exact) to use it in development environment. That way all your uploading will be faster and you don’t have to be online to do it.

To set up fakes3 and paperclip I use these steps:

Add an entry in your hosts file, in linux and Mac OS X this is /etc/hosts. You may have to use sudo to edit that file. Add this line below in that file, subtitute bucket with your S3 bucket name:

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127.0.0.1 bucket-name.localhost

After that you need to install fakes3 gem, but because paperclip use aws-sdk gem to deal with S3, and aws-sdk will use https to connect to S3, you need to use my fork of fakes3 to make it work, because the fakes3 gem from rubygems doesn’t support https.

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$ git clone https://github.com/rbudiharso/fake-s3.git
$ cd fakes3
$ gem build fakes3.gemspec
$ gem install -l fakes3-0.1.5.3.gem

Then after that to start the fakes3 server, run the following command

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$ cd path/to/rails/app
$ fakes3 server -h localhost -r public/system -p 10001

And then you need to setup paperclip to use the fakes3 server when your app is running in development environment. Somewhere in your model:

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has_attached_file :image, {
  styles: {
    large: '1024>',
    thumb: '128x128'
  }
}.merge(PAPERCLIP_STORAGE)

In your development.rb

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PAPERCLIP_STORAGE = {
  storage: :s3,
  s3_credentials: "#{Rails.root}/config/aws.yml",
  url: ":s3_domain_url",
  path: ":class/:attachment/:id_partition/:style/:filename.:extension",
  s3_protocol: 'https',
  s3_hostname: 'localhost:10001',
  s3_options: { server: 'localhost', port: 10001 }
}

In your config/aws.yml

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development:
  bucket: 'bucket-name'
  access_key_id: YOUR_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
  secret_access_key: YOUR_AWS_SECRET_KEY
staging:
  # snip
production:
  # snip

Lastly, start your rails server and you should be able to upload and retrieve file from fakes3 as if you uploading to AWS S3.