How to Fake an Uploaded File

Our store software contains an extensive set of routines for processing uploaded images and resizing them into various image sizes. We’ve recently been adding some code to support a bulk import function and it’s become necessary to somehow fake uploading a file, given a specific URL for an image.

The basic plan is to use Net::HTTP to connect to the remote server and grab the image and save it in a temporary file. It turns out that Rails contains a UploadedTempfile class which is a subclass of Tempfile, and this is used by the CGI routines to handle any uploaded files.

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