title: Sharing Uploaded Files between multiple Rails Applications
body: <p>I have multiple applications (an admin application, a "public"/non-admin application and a web service application) that all share a single database.  </p>
  
  <p>I've gotten the applications to share models and other code where appropriate, so I don't have multiple copies of the same code in each.  However, the one task that I've yet to configure is how to share files that get uploaded between applications.  I'm using <a href="http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Paperclip</a> to successfully upload files to my applications, but if it uploads the files to the application doing the upload.</p>
  
  <p>Ideally, I'd like to be able to serve all the files from the web service.  My idea was that I'd need some type of task executed every time a new file is uploaded to any of the applications to have the file created in the file structure of the web service.</p>
  
  <p>I know I could easily accomplish serving files from a single application if I loaded the files into the database (which is how I accomplished this in a similar application suite), but I'm not sure if that's the best route to go for managing/serving the files.  Another idea I had was storing the files in the database and having the web service manage "serving" them and having it create the file on the disk on the first request.  After the first request for the file, the web service would serve the file from the disk rather than from the database.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have any ideas on what the best way to accomplish this might be?  Or any better ideas?  </p>
  
  <p>Thank you in advance for any feedback anyone might have on the subject.</p>