Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Rails

Backblaze B2 is a great alternative to setting up cloud storage over AWS and its overwhelming console. In this write up I go over some simple steps to get Backblaze working on your Rails 7 app within minutes.

Overview of Steps:

Create Backblaze account and create bucket named after your app and environment
Create application keys for bucket by filling out form
Save the keys into Rails credentials
Install aws-sdk-s3 gem
Update config/storage.yml
Create an initializer file for AWS
Update config/environments/production.rb

The steps

After you have set up your Backblaze account, create a bucket and name it “appname-production” after your app or something that makes sense for your project.

Then in the left column you’ll see a link “Application Keys” and that is where you will click to create a set of keys specific to your bucket.

Find the “Add a New Application Key” button and fill out these fields:

Name of key (keyName): appname-production-key
Allow access to Bucket(s): Select the bucket you just created
Type of Access: Read and Write
Allow List All Bucket Names: I checked it because we’ll be using the S3 API
I left the rest blank if it was optional (File Name Prefix and Duration)

Click “Create New Key” and save the keyID and the applicationKey. Now we’ll take this time to add the keys to our Rails credentials. Since we are going to be using the AWS S3 api I just left my credential file looking like this:

aws:
  access_key_id: (keyID - replace with your own)
  secret_access_key: (applicationKey - replace with your own)

As the snippet states, match up access_key_id with keyID and secret_access_key to applicationKey.

Now we will install the aws-sdk-s3 gem. Add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'aws-sdk-s3', require: false

Open up your config/storage.yml file now and add this:

amazon:
  service: S3
  access_key_id: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:aws, :access_key_id) %>
  secret_access_key: <%= Rails.application.credentials.dig(:aws, :secret_access_key) %>
  region: us-east-005
  bucket: appname-<%= Rails.env %>

If you go back to the page with the list of your buckets, you can see the region of your bucket in the url listed as the Endpoint. Looks something like: “s3.us-east-005.backblazeb2.com”

Open up your config/initializers/aws.rb and add this:

require 'aws-sdk-core'

Aws.config.update({
  region: 'us-east-005', # Replace with your AWS region
  endpoint: 'https://s3.us-east-005.backblazeb2.com', # Replace with your S3 endpoint URL
  credentials: Aws::Credentials.new(Rails.application.credentials.dig(:aws, :access_key_id), Rails.application.credentials.dig(:aws, :secret_access_key))
})

And finally config/environments/production.rb:

# Store uploaded files on the local file system (see config/storage.yml for options).
config.active_storage.service = :amazon

After these steps you should be able to upload images to your cloud storage with ActiveStorage. Don’t forget to add your Rails master key in your environment so your app can decrypt the credentials in production!

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