Seems that Thoughtbot guys decided to retire Paperclip and are stopping all further development and support for it.
Github issues got deleted and there are just a handful of PRs that are marked "merge before deprecating": https://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip/pulls Can't really find announcement or discussion around it though.
It doesn't look like there's much of a reason to use 3rd party gems to handle file uploads in Rails going forward.
Here's a migration mini-guide: https://kyleke.es/posts/2018/04/migrating-from-paperclip-to-activestorage
Paperclip has been dead for awhile, and there’s plenty of reason to use Shrine instead. ActiveStorage is just another example of Rails adding basic functionality for people who don’t want to leave Rails land by using a much better quality gem.
I depend on Paperclip for a few monolithic legacy apps where I work, I just ran into an issue with configuring the URL path and found out that they had disabled the issues on Github, essentially locking me and everyone else out of all existing issues, even for read-only access.
I’m livid right now, there’s almost guaranteed to be one or a few issues there which contain answers to my problem, but the maintainers just decided to lock us out if it. Great.
I will use ActiveStorage for new projects, but people must understand there are legacy applications which can’t simply be migrated from one solution to another whenever people think they’re obsolete.
Caveat emptor. Couple of things Paperclip does that Active Storage doesn’t:
* Validation
* Content type security checks
* Default/placeholder images
* Scaled+cropped thumbnail images (special `320×320#` syntax)
* Eager generation of variants
Christ, I have so many huge apps depending on Paperclip, that I’m not spending $10,000 to migrate (many of which were originally migrated off older solutions). They could have handled this almost any other way, including NOT DELETING ALL THE ISSUES that contained important documentation.
Not wanting to maintain it is fair enough, I’d probably do the same if I were them, but deleting information about the gem is capricious and pointless.
They’re aware of y’all’s concerns after closing the issues and have opened them back up
Tried to, but I could not figure out how to get the URL for ActiveStorage so I could use it with my react front end. Only the URL helper was found. -10 points to paperclip
I tried using Paperclip for my video course website. Paperclip would not serve plain text files (vtt for subtitles). I ended up switching to carrierwave and have been happy with it.
Why not just rewrite to use activestorage? Could use several of the features like validation and imagemagick wrappers
Just FYI, Dragonfly is a fantastic alternative for flexible needs.
Hasn’t paperclip been dead since 2013? I was using Carrierwave for years until Rails died in 2016.