How to Migrate from AWS S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces in Rails 6
DigitalOcean Spaces is a convenient way to store files. It might be cheaper than AWS S3, depending on your use case. Luckily, the APIs are compatible, so switching is simple. I recently migrated a Rails 6 project that was using AWS S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces.
Generate Spaces API Keys
The first step is to generate DigitalOcean Spaces API keys to use in your Rails 6 app. In DigitalOcean, click on API
in the left pane, then click Generate New Key
next to Spaces access keys

Write these keys down and save them for later.
Edit Rails Credentials
Next, we need to add the DigitalOcean Spaces API keys and credentials to Rails. Using Rails Credentials is a secure way to manage them in Rails 6.
In your rails project directory, type rails credentials:edit
You will see something like this if you've been using Rails Credentials with AWS already:
aws:
access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_GOES_HERE
secret_access_key: SECRET_ACCESS_KEY_GOES_HERE
Add your DigitalOcean Spaces information under a new digitalocean
section in the file. You can delete the aws
section later if it isn't needed.
aws:
access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_GOES_HERE
secret_access_key: SECRET_ACCESS_KEY_GOES_HERE
digitalocean:
access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_GOES_HERE
secret_access_key: SECRET_ACCESS_KEY_GOES_HERE
endpoint: https://REGION.digitaloceanspaces.com
region: REGION
bucket: BUCKET_NAME
The access_key_id
and secret_access_key
are what you generated in the previous step.
endpoint
is from the URL of your Space. You can find it under the title of your Space if you remove the project. Include https://
in the config field.
region
can also be found in the URL of your Space.
bucket
is the name of your Space.

If you look closely, you can see a single space character before aws:
and before digitalocean:
. That space cost me an hour of my life. I'm not bitter.
Makes Rails Use DigitalOcean Spaces
Now we need to make ActiveStorage in Rails use the DigitalOcean Spaces information we just added to our Rails Credentials. To do that, we need to edit storage.yml
.
digitalocean:
service: S3
access_key_id: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :access_key_id) %>
secret_access_key: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :secret_access_key) %>
region: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :region) %>
bucket: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :bucket) %>
endpoint: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :endpoint) %>
<%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:digitalocean, :access_key_id) %>
means look in the Rails credentials file, under the digitalocean
section, for the access_key_id
field. Edit those if you used different names than in this tutorial.
The service is still S3. That isn't a typo. It's because DigitalOcean Spaces has an API compatible with S3 and Rails hasn't made an official service name for Spaces yet.
Make sure to remove or comment out the AWS/Amazon section of storage.yml
if you were using it before.
Then, we need to edit our environments to use DigitalOcean Spaces. I would recommend editing development.rb
first to test your changes. Most likely you'll want to set it to store files on your local disk, but for testing, we can set it to use DigitalOcean Spaces. That way, we won't have to test in the production environment.
Update this line in development.rb
config.active_storage.service = :digitalocean
It is set to :digitalocean
because that's what we defined in storage.yml
Test to make sure it works, then update the same line in production.rb
You probably want to change it back to store locally for the development environment. Change it to :local
in development.rb
to do that.
config.active_storage.service = :local
That's it. That's all it takes to migrate a Rails 6 project from AWS S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces.