hey, I'm glad to hear you chose Railway for your web dev journey

you have the right idea, storing images in a repo is okay for design assets and stuff but if you're storing a lot of images that act as content for your website rather than design (like images on pinterest for example) then a volume is the way to go

The filebrowser template is a good way to upload files onto a volume if you're not going to change the files in the volume frequently, if you are changing them frequently then you might want to build the functionality of uploading images into the volume directly into your app

to give you an idea of how to do that, brody (a Railway employee) has a few example applications for file-uploads here:

• Using Multer: https://github.com/brody192/multer-file-uploads

• Using Busyboy: https://github.com/brody192/busboy-file-uploads

If you do change the images on your website somewhat frequently but not frequently enough to warrant making a whole file-upload process for it then you could try using Filebrowser as your file-storage, you can then fetch the image URLs from filebrowser and use them within your application, just make sure that fits within your use-case

thank you!! i'll get started on making a way to upload posts directly from the website in that case. if all the images on the repo are currently stored in /public/img and all the blog posts reference that path, is it as simple as moving the images over to the volume, setting the mount path to presumably something including "/public/img" (i couldn't figure it out before) and then they'll show up fine?

Exactly! Although you'd want to mount your volume on "/app/public/img" because your app is placed in the "/app" directory (assuming you're not using a Dockerfile with a custom root directory set)

hi, thanks for the help. i've added a page to handle uploading images to a selected path, but i'm having trouble getting them to persist across deployments. i uploaded a few to test it out and they showed up fine, so i disconnected the volume to use filebrowser to upload the rest, but there wasn't anything there. then when i reconnected the volume the images were gone there as well. in my app i'm using ${process.env.RAILWAY_VOLUME_MOUNT_PATH} as a write destination with Multer, but i also noticed that when i uploaded some larger video files the 'volume usage' in my volume's metrics weren't going up? do you know what i might be doing wrong?

That's weird, so clearly the files aren't going into the volume..

is ${process.env.RAILWAY_VOLUME_MOUNT_PATH} the full write destination? or are you prefixing it at all?

Where's your volume mounted to?

volume is mounted to /app/public/img, locally the variable is set to public/img which also works. full write location is

${process.env.RAILWAY_VOLUME_MOUNT_PATH}/${req.body.location}, i tried without the /${req.body.location} and that wouldn't write to the volume either

interesting, can you jus try using /public/img then instead of process.env.RAILWAY_VOLUME_MOUNT_PATH, I know that seems counter intuitive but I'm curious if that'll solve anything

hi, sorry for the late reply, just tried this with no change

stepped away from this for a while but trying to get it working again. i can use filebrowser to upload files, disconnect the volume then connect it again with the same mount point and they're gone. the volume usage metric doesn't change at all during this

EDIT: got it working somehow! just deleted the volume and added a new one. can't think of what else could've changed. oh well