In this lesson, we are going to add some of the library files needed in order for our application to be able to: upload images, connect to the AWS S3 cloud storage service, and manage files.

Now that our image uploading libraries are in place, we can create our uploader. Carrierwave has a helpful generator that will setup a basic upload configuration file that we can use for our application.

In this lesson, we are going to configure our Carrierwave photo uploader. This will allow our application to know where file uploads should be directed to, how to manage dynamic sizing, and a number of other upload configuration options.

In this lesson, we are going to integrate the uploader into our Rails model because even though we already created an uploader for the application, the model file does not know that it exists.

In this lesson, we are going to talk a little bit about the Figaro gem and learn how to integrate it with our application. To refresh, Figaro is a gem that allows you to manage API keys and environment variables in a secure way. An alternative to the Figaro gem is the dotenv gem.