# Building a static mirror of a Rails site?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 12, 2006, 2:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364 "2006-09-12T02:09:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 2:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/1 "2006-09-12T02:09:30Z")

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Hello Rails L.!  
Thanks to those who commented on my prior thread about credit card  
handling; some smart, smart people on this list.

Here’s another one for you: I have a client for whom I’m building a  
site. They insist on using their existing webhost, which runs PHP  
4.3. OK, cool.

Luckily, for now, the site is going to be largely static. I could  
use, say, Dreamweaver and build everything using Dreamweaver  
templates, but I would much rather hang the site off Rails for the  
following reasons:

1. Dreamweaver is US$400. Rails, SVN, and a text editor are free.

2. I’m likely to be more productive in Rails, since I haven’t touched  
Dreamweaver or its templating system for a few years.

3. Building it in Rails today offers a degree of futureproofing, for  
when the client calls me 6 months from now and says “we’d like to add  
a blog, a booking system, a forms repository, and oh… can we have  
the ability to edit everything over the web?”

4. OMGWTFBBQ. Rails is, like, my BFF xoxoxox \<3

Then I got to thinking… I wonder if there’s a way to build a Rails  
site (which doesn’t use POST requests), and then dump the whole thing  
out â?? links, media, and all â?? to a set of static pages and files for  
launch on a plain webserver? I did a little searching on the web and  
on the Rails list; there were some folks a while back talking about  
using httrack, or wget to create a static mirror of a running Rails  
site. I gave it a shot with wget, and it showed some promise except  
for a few bugaboos:

1. “[http://mydomain.com/controller/action](http://mydomain.com/controller/action)” will get saved into a file  
named “action” in a “controller” directory. The lack of .htm  
extension on the file causes at least one webserver I tried this on  
to freak out and send the static file to the browser using a non-HTML  
content type. This, in turn, causes the HTML source to be displayed  
in the browser in plain text.

2. “[http://mydomain.com/controller/action/](http://mydomain.com/controller/action/)” will fail (note the  
trailing slash) since no “action” directory exists. #1 and #2 could  
be solved if wget would simply save the output of “http://  
[mydomain.com/controller/action](http://mydomain.com/controller/action)” to a file named “index.htm” in a  
“controller/action” directory.

3. wget will save image/css/js files along with Rails’ new  
timestamping/cachebusting tack-on, resulting in filenames such as  
“image.gif?44702193412”. This will, of course, break the static site,  
since the webserver strips everything after the “?” when trying to  
access whatever file.

So â?? what do you think? Comments? Suggestions? Links to prior art  
that I might have missed?

Cheers,  
Steven L. (BDes Hons., Provisional RGD)  
{  
c = Steven L. Design;  
w = [http://www.stevenluscherdesign.com/](http://www.stevenluscherdesign.com/)  
}

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 2:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/2 "2006-09-12T02:33:30Z")

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Steven L. wrote:

> _Then I got to thinking… I wonder if there’s a way to build a Rails  
> site (which doesn’t use POST requests), and then dump the whole thing  
> out ? links, media, and all ? to a set of static pages and files for  
> launch on a plain webserver?_ I did a little searching on the web and on

Could you use page caching on all controllers/action. Visit all pages  
(perhaps programatically with a rake task) and then copy all the file in  
public/ up to the webserver (perhaps with a rake task or Capistrano  
setup).

Eric

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 2:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/3 "2006-09-12T02:41:31Z")

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On 9/11/06, Steven L. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> using httrack, or wget to  
> create a static mirror of a running Rails site. I gave it a shot with wget,  
> and it showed some promise except for a few bugaboos:
> 
> 1. “[http://mydomain.com/controller/action](http://mydomain.com/controller/action)” will get saved  
> into a file named “action” in a “controller” directory. The lack of .htm  
> extension on the file

wget --html-extension

> causes at least one webserver I tried this on to freak  
> out and send the static file to the browser using a non-HTML content type.  
> This, in turn, causes the HTML source to be displayed in the browser in  
> plain text.
> 
> 1. “[http://mydomain.com/controller/action/](http://mydomain.com/controller/action/)” will fail (note  
> the trailing slash) since no “action” directory exists. #1 and #2 could be  
> solved if wget would simply save the output of  
> “[http://mydomain.com/controller/action](http://mydomain.com/controller/action)” to a file named  
> “index.htm” in a “controller/action” directory.

wget --no-directories

man wget

–  
Greg D.  
[http://destiney.com/](http://destiney.com/)

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 2:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/4 "2006-09-12T14:54:55Z")

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Steven L. wrote:

> On 11-Sep-06, at 5:18 PM, Eric A. wrote:
> 
> > Could you use page caching on all controllers/action.  
> > I was going to mention this, but thought I’d wait until someone  
> > brought it up. Could that actually work?

As long as you remember to run the app in production mode, it should.  
Then simply use wget to traverse the site, triggering all actions, and  
upload the cached files in public/ (ie not the wget files) to the host.

–  
Jakob S. - [http://mentalized.net](http://mentalized.net)

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 3:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/5 "2006-09-12T15:25:01Z")

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Hi all,

I have a question about the following ticket. The patch provided on this  
ticket fixes the problem (for me). Despite this fact, I don’t see this  
code in the trunk. Can someone tell me why this is?

Another thing is that I tried to override this function in the lib  
directory, with the patch applied, but somehow, it still uses the old  
code. I wanted to fix my problem in a clean way by overriding the  
actioncontroller module. But I can’t get it working. And hacking a gem  
myself isn’t a long term solution.

Thanks in advance,  
Jeroen van Doorn

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 7:18am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/6 "2006-09-12T07:18:02Z")

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On 11-Sep-06, at 5:18 PM, Eric A. wrote:

> Could you use page caching on all controllers/action.  
> I was going to mention this, but thought I’d wait until someone  
> brought it up. Could that actually work?

On 11-Sep-06, at 5:32 PM, Greg D. wrote:

> wget --html-extension  
> wget --no-directories

Thanks for the notes Greg! “wget -k --html-extension --no-  
directories” solves a couple of problems, but creates another; if  
we’re going to start letting wget rename links and tack on .html  
extensions, then when we eventually do launch the site on Rails, any  
links made to the site from the outside will break (http://  
[mydomain.com/controller/action.html](http://mydomain.com/controller/action.html) will become “[http://mydomain.com/](http://mydomain.com/)  
controller/action” again).

Steven L. (BDes Hons., Provisional RGD)  
{  
c = Steven L. Design;  
w = [http://www.stevenluscherdesign.com/](http://www.stevenluscherdesign.com/)  
}

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 3:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/7 "2006-09-12T15:30:03Z")

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i was going to post the same question after i completed my first rails  
app. it would be so nice to have a rake command that would do this and  
create a whole new directory with all the static content!

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**Author:** ![steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/3bc359/32.png) [@steveluscher](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/steveluscher)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2006, 4:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/building-a-static-mirror-of-a-rails-site/68364/8 "2006-09-12T16:21:10Z")

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Steven L. wrote:

> So ? what do you think? Comments? Suggestions? Links to prior art  
> that I might have missed?

I have posted a similar question but got no replies… I am very  
interested  
though! I guess a good rake task can do the job…

Bart