MediaGallery

This gem provides a Rails engine that allows for the storage of images on Amazon S3. Images are organized in galleries. All interactions are done through a simple REST API.

As this is a Rails engine, you need to mount it in your app. This can be done by modifying your config/routes.rb file. You can add a line like:

mount MediaGallery::Engine => "/media_gallery"

Next, you need to deal with access control. The media_gallery engine uses cancancan for access_control. It does not make any assumptions as to what library or method you use for sign in. It works fine with Devise if that is what you are using. JWT access will also work. You do need to override two methods in the MediaGallery::ApplicationController class. These methods are:

• current_user: Returns the current user
• create_ability: Returns an cancan Ability class for use in the media_gallery. It can be your app's defined ability.

The recommended approach for this is to create an initializer. You can check out the one defined in the spec/dummy test app. It defines something like:

MediaGallery::ApplicationController.class_eval do

  def current_user
    User.find_by_token(request.headers['token'])
  end

  def create_ability(user)
    Ability.new(user)
  end
end

You can also look at an example of how this can be done with Devise here.

Lastly, media_gallery uses carrierwave to interact with the S3 storage system. Carrierwave needs to be configured appropriately. The way we do it is through another initializer file (e.g. config/initializers/carrierwave_s3.rb) which defines something like:

class FogSettings

  def self.S3
    {
      :provider               => 'AWS',
      :aws_access_key_id      => ENV['MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_PUBLIC'],
      :aws_secret_access_key  => ENV['MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_SECRET']
    }
  end

  def self.directory
    ENV['MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_DIR']
  end

end

CarrierWave.configure do |config|

  config.fog_credentials = FogSettings.S3
  config.fog_directory   = FogSettings.directory

  #The following is specifically for Heroku.  Heroku only allows you to save data
  #in the tmp folder.  We therefore make sure that the tmp files are put there.
  #See https://github.com/jnicklas/carrierwave/wiki/How-to%3A-Make-Carrierwave-work-on-Heroku
  config.cache_dir = "#{Rails.root}/tmp/uploads"

end

In the previous block, the MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS... keys are fed from the environment. You can use whatever approach you want. If deploying in Heroku or AWS, it's better to use this approach as your deployed code does not have hardcoded values.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'media_gallery'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install media_gallery

You'll also need to ensure that the associated migrations are run. You can do this with the following:

bin/rails media_gallery:install:migrations
bin/rails db:migrate SCOPE=media_gallery

If you want to help out, no problem. The more, the merrier. You can fix issues if you want to or look at the list of outstanding features here.

Make sure that you write unit tests. We presently have model and request specs. The request specs require you to have an AWS account with S3 setup correctly. You then need to define three environment variables:

• MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_PUBLIC
• MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_SECRET
• MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_DIR

The rspecs look for these variables in your environment. On Linux or Mac, you can add something like this to you .bash_profile

export MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_PUBLIC=AJEJEKNJE87JS 
export MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_SECRET=Bskljfslkdjflksjflkjslls+sljksjlk
export MEDIA_GALLERY_TEST_AWS_DIR=gallery2018

(All values provided in the previous block are fake... obviously :-)

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.