After experiencing some problems configuring Paperclip to behave the way we wanted with S3, I decided to move SNGTRKR to the Carrierwave gem. I had feared this would be a horrible breaking change, but in reality it wasn’t too bad at all. Nevertheless there were some undocumented or poorly documented differences that I thought I’d cover here.

The vast majority of what you need to know is covered in the Carrierwave documentation, specifically the migrating from paperclip section. In summary, you include a mixin that changes the URL syntax in your Carrierwave uploader to be equivalent to Paperclip’s, allowing you to copy paste your Paperclip path into Carrierwave without problem.

The one bit of advice that was not clear to be till delving into the Carrierwave docs was this: the first argument to the mount_uploader argument dictates the column name in which the filename of your upload is expected to be held. For example:

 # app/models/artist.rb
  mount_uploader :image, ArtistUploader

Will check @artist.image for text. Now if you migrated from paperclip, and accessed your images previously through @artist.image, you will not have an image field in your artists table. What you will have, containing that exact information, is an image_file_name field.

So all that needs to be done, is a column rename! Or if that’s not an option and you just want to test out Carrierwave, you could also change mount_uploader :image, ... to mount_uploader :image_file_name, .... My migration was as follows:

 # migration_to_carrierwave.rb
class PaperclipToCarrierwave < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
  	rename_column :artists, :image_file_name, :image
  	rename_column :releases, :image_file_name, :image
  end
end

Note the use of change to allow for two way migrations should we switch back for whatever reason.