Tag: Programming

Using Multiple Cloudfront Domains with Paperclip

In order to speed up asset loading using a CDN is generally regarded as a good idea. It is also recommended to split up requests among separate hostnames to allow the browser to parallelize loading.

Enabling this in Rails with Paperclip is pretty easy, though the documentation isn’t extremely rich.

You’ll want to set the s3_host_alias option to a proc which determines the correct domain alias based on the id of the object the attachment is for.

  has_attached_file :image, S3_OPTS.merge(
    :s3_host_alias => Proc.new {|attachment| "images#{attachment.instance.id % 4}.pixieengine.com" },
    :styles => {
      ...
    }
  )

This sends requests to the following hostnames:

images0.pixieengine.com
images1.pixieengine.com
images2.pixieengine.com
images3.pixieengine.com

The best part is that the same image will always have the same hostname. I’ve seen some people suggest randomly choosing a domain, but that reduces caching potential as the same item could be requested from multiple different domains over time.