In rails when you create links in your view it’s best to use link_to or url_for tags when creating urls. However, both of these methods take as arguments the controller and/or action to generate a link for. If you’re trying to link to something in the public directory, like a static html file, then there is no controller or action. Instead of hardcoding the link, use compute_public_path:
<%=compute_public_path('file-name-without-extention','parent-dir','extension')%>
So if you’re trying to link to a file public/static_files/foo.html just do:
<%=compute_public_path('foo','static_files','html')%>
2 Comments
Good little tip.
Any ideas on how got get mod_alias type behaviour using this – I searched all over.
E.g. using compute_public_path with/without routes.rb so that:
gets served from RAILS_ROOT/vendor/plugins/mycustomplugin/images/image.png rather than from RAILS_ROOT/public/images/image.png
I would have thought this was common place but can’t find anything?
I’m not sure you can load images from plugins in your vendor directory (I could be wrong). What you could do is write a generator for your plugin that moves the images to a directory under /public.