Apostrophe 3 CMS on Heroku always clearing files in uploads/attachments after deploying

Question

I have Apostrophe 3 CMS hosted on Heroku, but whenever i do deployment for my code changes, the files always clearing and the media image will be broken since the files is no more on the folder. Anyone know how to solve this?

Answer 1

I realize this post was a long time ago, but for anyone just reading it now: the Apostrophe documentation includes an article covering Heroku in depth, including a subsection about how to use Amazon S3 for persistent media storage, which is what your question is specifically about.

I won't duplicate the entire article here, but what you need to do is (1) create an AWS S3 bucket, (2) set that bucket to allow public access to files (you will have to override a number of warnings that are meant for people who did not intend to serve anything to the public), and then (3) set the appropriate Heroku environment variables based on your AWS S3 credentials:

heroku config:set APOS_S3_BUCKET=YOUR-bucket-name
heroku config:set APOS_S3_SECRET=YOUR-s3-secret
heroku config:set APOS_S3_KEY=YOUR-s3-key
heroku config:set APOS_S3_REGION=YOUR-chosen-region

Your S3 key and secret can be API credentials associated with your root AWS account, but for security reasons it's better to create an IAM account with access only to S3.

Then redeploy or restart your site on Heroku. The presence of APOS_S3_BUCKET will automatically switch Apostrophe's uploadfs storage backend from local to s3.

The above is necessary because Heroku doesn't guarantee that your code will always run on the same server. That means the file system accessible to your Node.js code is ephemeral. You can rely on it for the lifetime of a particular HTTP request, e.g. for temporary files, but you can't rely on it beyond that.