I recently released tus-ruby-server, a Ruby server implementation for tus, an open protocol for resumable file uploads built on HTTP.

Protocol

Let’s first briefly explain what is tus. Tus is a specification that describes the communication between the client and the server through HTTP for achieving reliable and resumable file uploads, even on unstable networks. Check out the demo.

“Resumable upload” doesn’t mean giving your user a button to resume the upload whenever there is a network hiccup. It means having the client automatically reinitiate interrupted uploads without the user knowing about it. Tus enables resuming the upload even after the user closes the browser or shuts down the device, as long as the user selects the same file.

Tus was created by Transloadit, and has received feedback from well-known companies like Vimeo, Google and GitHub.

Implementations

There are many client-side implementations, including JavaScript, iOS and Android, as well as server-side implementations, covering Go, Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, .NET and others.

There already is an existing Ruby server implementation, Rubytus. However, there are two main reasons why I decided to write my own:

One reason is that at the time of this writing Rubytus supported an older version of the protocol. When I attempted to bring it to tus 1.0, I realized that many things have changed since that version.

Another reason is that it’s written in a non-standard web framework, Goliath. Goliath is a non-blocking Ruby web framework built on top of EventMachine. I think Goliath is great when you want to scale apps that do a lot of IO (like database writing and HTTP requests), but here we’re just writing files to the filesystem. And while Goliath definitely has a nice callback-less API, you still have to be aware that you’re writing asynchronous code, which made it difficult for me to precisely implement the protocol.

Ruby server

The tus-ruby-server fully implements the tus protocol with all its extensions, and it’s written in Roda, for me the best web framework for writing APIs. With Roda you can route and handle requests in a very linear and DRY way, which allowed me to precisely follow the specification and return the appropriate status and HTTP headers for various situations.

But from the developer’s perspective, tus-ruby-server is just a Rack app which you can run standalone or as part of your app:

# Gemfile gem "tus-server"

# config.ru require "tus/server" map "/files" do run Tus :: Server end

On the client-side you can now use tus-js-client to listen on file select, and initiate a tus upload to the endpoint.

fileInput . addEventListener ( " change " , function ( e ) { var file = e . target . files [ 0 ]; var upload = new tus . Upload ( file , { endpoint : " http://localhost:9292/files/ " , chunkSize : 15 * 1024 * 1024 , // 15MB }); upload . start (); });

After upload is complete you will get a URL to the uploaded file, and you’ll probably want to attach it to a database record. Shrine is one file attachment library that supports attaching by custom URLs using shrine-url, see shrine-tus-demo on how you can integrate these.

http://localhost:9292/files/ebfe84d3921ce31fe603c6a9ae5f81b8

Other popular file attachment libraries like CarrierWave, Paperclip, Refile or Dragonfly also support attaching remote files via URLs, but they will also automatically download the file. This is not really feasible here, because these files will typically be fairly large (that’s why we’re using this protocol in the first place).

Shrine allows you to save only the URL, and spawn a background job which will upload this file to a storage of your choice. This keeps the form submission instantaneous.

Ok, now that we got the integration out of the way, I thought it would be interesting to go over some parts of the tus protocol, to see how it can improve the general user experience around file uploads.

Uploading

Tus enables file data to be sent in multiple PATCH requests:

PATCH /files/{uid} HTTP / 1.1 Content-Type : application/offset+octet-stream Content-Length : 30 Upload-Offset : 0 Tus-Resumable : 1.0.0 [ first 30 bytes ]

PATCH /files/{uid} HTTP / 1.1 Content-Type : application/offset+octet-stream Content-Length : 70 Upload-Offset : 30 Tus-Resumable : 1.0.0 [ next 70 bytes ]

The interesting header here is Upload-Offset , which allows the client to continue sending more data to an existing upload. This means the client can split large files into multiple chunks, and repeat PATCH requests that failed due to network issues.

Concatenation

In addition to appending to an existing upload, the protocol also supports uploading the chunks individually, and then concatenating them into a single file. This allows the client to upload multiple chunks in parallel, which can provide a significant overall speedup:

[…] on our internal network, sending a 110 MB file to S3 with chunk sizes of 5 MB took about 22 seconds when chunks were uploaded one-at-a-time (with concurrent chunking disabled). When maxing out the default maxConnections for that file (3 chunks at once, concurrent chunking enabled) the same file uploaded in about 12 seconds. — Ray Nicholus, creator of FineUploader

We could for example upload two chunks:

PATCH /files/a HTTP / 1.1 Upload-Concat : partial Upload-Offset : 0 Content-Length : 5 hello

PATCH /files/b HTTP / 1.1 Upload-Concat : partial Upload-Offset : 0 Content-Length : 6 world

And then concatenate them into a single file:

POST /files HTTP / 1.1 Upload-Concat : final;/files/a /files/b

HTTP / 1.1 201 Created Location : /files/ab

The length of the final resource is now 11 bytes consisting of hello world :

HEAD /files/ab HTTP / 1.1

HTTP / 1.1 200 OK Upload-Length : 11 Upload-Concat : final;/files/a /files/b

Checksum

Networks are not reliable, and sometimes bytes can get lost. That’s why tus allows the client to send a checksum of the data it’s sending.

PATCH /files/{uid} HTTP / 1.1 Content-Length : 11 Upload-Offset : 0 Upload-Checksum : sha1 Kq5sNclPz7QV2+lfQIuc6R7oRu0= hello world

When server receives the data, it too can generate a checksum of the received data using the same algorithm, and verify that it matches the received one.

HTTP / 1.1 204 No Content Upload-Offset : 11

Termination

In addition to resuming, with tus you can also give users the ability to terminate uploads, which deletes the data that was uploaded up to that point.

DELETE /files/{uid} HTTP / 1.1

Storage

The tus-ruby-server implementation by default stores uploaded files on the filesystem. However, the downside of storing files on the filesystem is that it isn’t distributed, so for the resumable uploads to work you would have to host tus-ruby-server on a single server.

That might or might not be a bottleneck, depending on the rate of file uploads you’re accepting. Alternatively you can choose the Mongo GridFS storage, which among other things is convenient for multi-server setup.

require "tus/server" require "tus/storage/gridfs" # requires the "mongo" gem client = Mongo :: Client . new ( "mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/mydb" ) Tus :: Server . opts [ :storage ] = Tus :: Storage :: Gridfs . new ( client: client )

You can also write your own storage which implements the same interface as Tus::Storage::Filesystem and Tus::Storage::Gridfs .

Limitations

One advantage of Rubytus is that the Goliath web framework is able to handle interrupted PATCH requests, by saving all the data it has received before the HTTP connection was closed.

# Code is from https://github.com/picocandy/rubytus class TusServer < Goliath :: API # executed when headers are received def on_headers ( env , headers ) # ... end # executed whenever part of the body is received def on_body ( env , data ) if env [ "REQUEST_METHOD" ] == "PATCH" env [ "api.buffers" ] << data # save the received data else env [ "rack.input" ] = StringIO . new ( data ) # default behaviour end end # executed when the connection is closed (either completed or interrupted) def on_close ( env ) if env [ "REQUEST_METHOD" ] == "PATCH" storage . patch_file ( env [ "api.uid" ], env [ "api.buffers" ]) # store the received data end end end

Tus-ruby-server is implemented in Roda, which is built on top of Rack (like most other web frameworks), and from research that I performed, web servers for Rack applications don’t have a configuration option for forwarding interrupted requests to the app.

By default tus-js-client will use only a single PATCH request to upload the whole file, and send additional ones if the connection gets interrupted. So you just need to configure tus-js-client or whichever client library you’re using to upload in multiple chunks. This way if the connection gets interrupted, all previously uploaded chunks will remain on the server.

new tus . Upload ( file , { endpoint : " http://localhost:9292/files/ " , chunkSize : 15 * 1024 * 1024 , // 15MB });

Since chunked uploads can even significantly speed up the general upload if you use parallelization, not being able to resume an upload of a single PATCH request practically shouldn’t be a significant limitation.

Conclusion

I’m really excited that, rather than each company implementing their own protocol, we now have an open stable resumable upload protocol which we can all agree on, and build generic client and server libraries which everyone can use.

With tus-ruby-server and Shrine on the server, and tus-js-client / TUSKit / tus-android-client on the client, anyone can now add resumable file uploads to their Ruby applications.