Is There a Best Directory to Place Image Uploads on Heroku

Can I store uploaded images in a public folder on Heroku?

No, it's not okay to do this on Heroku.

Heroku's filesystem is ephemeral. Any changes you make will be lost the next time your dyno restarts. This happens frequently (at least once per day).

While data stored in your database won't be lost when your dyno restarts there are good reasons not to store images (or other files) directly in your database. Heroku recommends storing uploads in something like Amazon S3.

how to store images on heroku

Heroku dose not allow any file excluding git. However you can use https://cloudinary.com for image upload its free.

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

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.

How to upload files from a backend (Heroku) to frontend in (Netlify) hosted on github

A two part answer:

• Your back-end has no business putting files into your front-end's directory structure.

  A better choice might be to use an uploads/ folder in the back-end project, exposing those over HTTPS, and linking to them from your front-end.

• But that won't work on Heroku due to its ephemeral filesystem.

  An even better choice would be to save them to a cloud-based object store like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage, or a more specialized service like Cloudinary if they're images. Heroku tends to recommend S3.

  Your back-end now just needs to store the URL to each file and provide that link to your front-end upon request.

  Even on other hosts that allow you to save files into your back-end's filesystem, using a third-party service has many benefits. You can trivially scale horizontally (adding new nodes), your application becomes less stateful, etc.

User uploads never belong in your code repository, no matter how and where you choose to host them. They are content, not code, and should not be tracked and versioned alongside your code.

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