In its eleventh year as an open source project, we have decided to halt work on Paperclip. This comes from a combination of already slowed work on the project, a constantly growing list of issues and pull requests that we struggle to keep on top of, and most recently the release of ActiveStorage in Rails 5.2.

For moving from Paperclip to ActiveStorage, please see the migration guide. As you migrate and learn lessons, please contribute back to the migration guide.

We have closed issues and pull requests unrelated to our deprecation process.

Merge bug fixes. We do not want to introduce new bugs so we are being careful to merge very few remaining pull requests, focusing on bug fixes. We understand that new bugs often occur when bugs are fixed and we want to leave the project in a stable state. One last official release. This will be a major version bump containing the last of the bug fixes and maintenance we will perform. Release with a deprecation notice. This will be identical to the bugfix release, only it spams your logs with a deprecation notice. This is a separate release so that you can upgrade to it at your leisure.

We will leave the Issues open but will not monitor it. Feel free to use it as a forum among yourselves.

We will only accept pull requests against the migration guide.

This work will be done during our investment time, and we intend to finish it by September 2018.

Paperclip began in August of 2007 in reaction to hand-rolled file uploading and the attachment_fu project. It was a pet project of Jon Yurek, worked on at thoughtbot between projects (this was before we had regular investment time), with the first commit from someone besides Jon coming in April of 2008 by Mark Van Holstyn.

From there it took off. It, and later shoulda, defined open source at thoughtbot for an era, driving our marketing ideas, setting precedent for when and how to work on projects, and connecting us with the larger Rails ecosystem.

De facto maintainership changed hands a few times. Prem Sichanugrist’s first commit came in 2011; he co-maintained it with Jon, eventually swapping in as the main point of contact. Soon thereafter I came in, giving it the light touch of merging pull requests and ensuring releases went out.

Our first security report came in 2014 from Egor Homakov. More came after, which caused me to disable image rendering in my browser. Many reporters used our secure reporting process for this.

Other milestones of note: we switched from Subversion to Git in 2008. In 2011 we began a refactoring effort to make Paperclip easier to extend. We did this again in 2013.

In late 2017 we began the internal discussions of deprecating Paperclip. ActiveStorage was under heavy development, Paperclip was not, and another security bug report came in. We came up with a plan, caused one or two mistakes along the way, and now here we are.

Paperclip has been an amazing journey and we wish ActiveStorage the best of luck along their new adventure.

Thank you to all who contributed to Paperclip over the past decade. We could not have gotten here without you.

And an extra big thank you to the project leaders along the way. A project lives or dies by their leader, and you all lead one of the most successful and popular open source projects on GitHub and within the Rails ecosystem.

Most importantly, thank you to all who used Paperclip along the years. You trusted us with your files and pushed us to do better every day.