Can I host images in heroku? Or do I need S3?

Question

I\'m deploying my web app (it\'s for a corporate client). So, users will not add images, but only the business will.

I\'ve deployed to Heroku, and my images are sti

Answer 1

The short answer: if you allow users or admins to upload images, you should not use Heroku's file system for this as the images will suddenly vanish.

As explained in the Heroku documentation:

Each dyno gets its own ephemeral filesystem, with a fresh copy of the most recently deployed code. During the dyno’s lifetime its running processes can use the filesystem as a temporary scratchpad, but no files that are written are visible to processes in any other dyno and any files written will be discarded the moment the dyno is stopped or restarted.

This means that user uploaded images on the Heroku filesystem are not only wiped out with every push, but also with every dyno restart, which occasionally happens (even if you would ping them frequently to prevent them going to sleep).

Once you start using a second web dyno, it will not be able to read the other dyno's filesystem, so then images would only be visible from one dyno. This would cause weird issues where users can sometimes see images and sometimes they don't.

That said, you can temporarily store images on the Heroku filesystem if you implement a pass-through file upload to an external file store.