Cloudinary

What is it?

Cloudinary is an image and video management system in the cloud. It includes:

• Storage
• Upload
• "Powerful Administration"
• Image Manipulation
• A fast CDN

It is used by companies like Gizmodo, GQ, Answers, Redbull, Ebay etc.

See here for more.

It's also quite simple to set up so let's get that going.

How to get it up and running

First things first, sign up for an account here.

• Let's set up a new rails project - making sure to start it off with postgresql (just as a habit) - rails new cloudinary-test -d postgresql
• We will use some Rails generators to make all our migrations etc. - rails generate model Animal name:string image:string
• We then need to run rake db:create and rake db:migrate
• We need to add gem 'cloudinary' to our Gemfile
• Then we need to run bundle
• Because Cloudinary is an API, we need to identify ourselves with it. Luckily they have a file that we can download that will do this for us - go here (if it doesn't do anything, make sure you are logged in).
  • This will download a file called cloudinary.yml - we need to save that in the config folder. This will be run everytime your server gets run

• Let's change our Routes ...

    Rails.application.routes.draw do
      root 'animals#index'
      get 'animals/new'
      post 'animals' => 'animals#create'
    end
  

• Let's create some views for us to work with - rails g controller Animals index new

    def index
        @animals = Animal.all
    end
  
    def new
        @animal = Animal.new
    end
  

• And then make those views

• new.html.erb

    <%= form_tag @animal, url: "/animals", multipart: true do %>
      <%= label_tag "Animal Name: " %>
      <%= text_field_tag :name %>
  
      <br />
      <br />
      <%= label_tag "Animal Image: " %>
      <%= cl_image_upload_tag :avatar %>
  
      <br />
      <br />
      <%= submit_tag "Create Animal." %>
    <% end %>
  

• In this form, we have said that we are posting it to /animals, so we need to make sure our routes have something for that - post 'animals' => 'animals#create'

• In our create method, it should look something like this:

    req = Cloudinary::Uploader.upload( params[:file] )
    @animal = Animal.create( name: params[:name], avatar: req["url"] )
  

• We have an error, and that is because we haven't given Cloudinary the appropriate details

• Add this into the head tag of your application.html.erb - <%= cloudinary_js_config %>. This will append your form with a bunch of cloudinary related configuration things.