How to assign a remote file to Carrierwave?

Question

I have video model with the following definition:

class Video
  require 'carrierwave/orm/activerecord'
  mount_uploader :attachment, VideoUploader
  mount_uploader :attachment_thumbnail, VideoThumbnailUploader
  ...
end

When I upload a video file. It also sends the file to our encoding service Zencoder, which encodes the video file and creates a thumbnail for it.

Normally, I could do something like @video.attachment.url, which will return the path of the video file. I'd like to do the same thing with the thumbnail. i.e. @video.attachment_thumbnail.url

However, since the attachment is created by our encoding service, which also uploads it to a specified S3 bucket. How do I assign the attachment to the attachment_thumbnail column for the record?

Can I simply do something like:

@video.update_attributes(
  :attachment_thumbnail => 'https://bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/users/1/video/1/thumb.png'
)

Is it possible to assign files like this to Carrierwave?

Answer 1

You can do the following:

@video.remote_attachment_thumbnail_url = 'https://bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/users/1/video/1/thumb.png'

But that will cause Carrierwave to download + reprocess the file rather than just make it the thumbnail. If you're not going to use Carrierwave's processing, then it might make more sense to just store the URL to the thumbnail on the model rather than even using Carrierwave.