Image not showing immediately after uploading in sails.js - sails.js

Question

In my application ,I have stored uploaded images to folder ./assets/uploads. I am using easyimage and imagemagick for storing the images.
In my application, after uploading the images, it should show the new uploaded image. But it is not displayed even if the page is refreshed. But when i do sails lift , the image is shown.
How to show image immediately after uploading the image? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

It's a totally normal situation, because of the way Sails works with the assets.
The thing is that upon sails lift the assets are being copied (including directory structure and symlinks) from ./assets folder to ./.tmp/public, which becomes publicly accessible.
So, in order to show your images immediately after upload, you, basically, need to upload them not to ./assets/uploads but to ./.tmp/public/uploads.
The only problem now is that the ./.tmp folder is being rewritten each time your application restarts, and storing uploads in ./tmp/... would make them erased after every sails lift. The solution here would be storing uploads in, for example, ./uploads and having a symlink ./assets/uploads pointing to ../uploads.

Answer 2

Though this question is pretty old but I would like to add a solution which I just implemented.
Today I spend almost 4 hours trying all those solutions out there. But none helped. I hope this solution will save someone else's time.
WHY images are not available immediately after uploading to any custom directory?
Because according to the default Sails setup, you can not access assets directly from the assets directory. Instead you have to access the existing assets that is brought to .tmp/public directory by Grunt at time of sails lift ing
THE Problems
(Available but Volatile) If you upload a file (say image) anywhere inside .tmp/public
directory, your file (image) is going to erase at next sails lift
(Unavailability) If you upload a file in any other custom directory- say: ./assets/images, the uploaded file will not be available immediately but at next sails lift it will be available. Which doesn't makes sense because - cant restart server each time files gets uploaded in production.
MY SOLUTION (say I want to upload my images in ./assets/images dir)
Upload the file say image.ext in ./tmp/public/images/image.ext (available and volatile)
On upload completion make a copy of the file image.ext to ./assets/images/*file.ext (future-proof)
CODE
var uploadToDir = '../public/images';
req.file("incoming_file").upload({
saveAs:function(file, cb) {
cb(null,uploadToDir+'/'+file.filename);
}
},function whenDone(err,files){
if (err) return res.serverError(err);
if( files.length > 0 ){
var ImagesDirArr = __dirname.split('/'); // path to this controller
ImagesDirArr.pop();
ImagesDirArr.pop();
var path = ImagesDirArr.join('/'); // path to root of the project
var _src = files[0].fd // path of the uploaded file
// the destination path
var _dest = path+'/assets/images/'+files[0].filename
// not preferred but fastest way of copying file
fs.createReadStream(_src).pipe(fs.createWriteStream(_dest));
return res.json({msg:"File saved", data: files});
}
});
I dont like this solution at all but yet it saved more of my time and it works perfectly in both dev and prod ENV.
Thanks

Answer 3

Sails uses grunt to handle asset syncing. By default, the grunt-watch task ignores empty folders, but as long as there's at least one file in a folder, it will always sync it. So the quickest solution here, if you're intent on using the default static middleware to server your uploaded files, is to just make sure there's always at least one file in your assets/uploads folder when you do sails lift. As long as that's the case, the uploads folder will always be synced to your .tmp/public folder, and anything that's uploaded to it subsequently will be automatically copied over and available immediately.
Of course, this will cause all of your uploaded files to be copied into .tmp/public every time your lift Sails, which you probably don't want. To solve this, you can use the symlink trick #bredikhin posted in his answer.

Answer 4

Try to do this:
npm install grunt-sync --save-dev --save-exact
uncomment the line: // grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sync');
usually it is near to the end of the file /tasks/config/sync.js.
lift the App again
Back to the Original answer

Answer 5

I was using node version 10.15.0, and I faced same problem. I solved this by updating to current version of node(12.4.0) and also updated npm and all the node modules. After this, I fixed the vulnerabilities(just run 'npm audit fix') and the grunt error that was coming while uploading the images to assets/images folder was fixed.

Answer 6

Try out this implementation
create a helper to sync the file
example of the filesync helper
// import in file
const fs = require('fs')
module.exports = {
friendlyName: 'Upload sync',
description: '',
inputs: {
filename:{
type:'string'
}
},
exits: {
success: {
description: 'All done.',
},
},
fn: async function ({
filename
}) {
var uploadLocation = sails.config.custom.profilePicDirectory + filename;
var tempLocation = sails.config.custom.tempProfilePicDirectory + filename;
//Copy the file to the temp folder so that it becomes available immediately
await fs.createReadStream(uploadLocation).pipe(fs.createWriteStream(tempLocation));
// TODO
return;
}
};
now call this helper to sync your files to the .temp folder
const fileName = result[0].fd.split("\\").reverse()[0];
//Sync to the .temp folder
await await sails.helpers.uploadSync(fileName);
reference to save in env
profilePicDirectory:path.join(path.resolve(),"assets/images/uploads/profilePictures/")
tempProfilePicDirectory:path.join(path.resolve(),".tmp/public/images/uploads/profilePictures/"),
also can try
process.cwd()+filepath