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

Asset Pipeline

FiveDigit's answer is very good - there is something more to consider; the role of the asset pipeline in Rails

If the images you have are used as assets (IE they are used in the layout; are not changeable by the user), then you can store them in the assets/images folder. There is no limit to the number of assets you can keep with your application, but you must be sure on what these are - they are files which aid your application's operation; not files which can be uploaded / manipulated:

The asset pipeline provides a framework to concatenate and minify or compress JavaScript and CSS assets. It also adds the ability to write these assets in other languages and pre-processors such as CoffeeScript, Sass and ERB.

The asset pipeline will compress & fingerprint the stylesheet, image and js files it has, when you deploy your application to the likes of Heroku, or any other server. This means if those files don't change, you can store them in there

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S3

The reason you'd want to use the likes of S3 is specifically if your images files are designed to change (user can upload / edit them). Regardless of Heroku's filesystem, if the images are tied to changes in the DB, you'll have to keep a central store for them - if you change servers, they need to be reachable

To do this, you should ensure you appreciate how you want the files to work - are they going to be manipulated constantly by the user or not? If so, you'll have to explore integrating S3 into your app