File_column :root_path question

Rails
1

I’m developing on Windows and deploying to FreeBSD+lighttpd using
Switchtower and I’ve got things generally working. My problem now is
that file_column data gets zapped every time I deploy, because
Switchtower creates a whole new myapp/public directory with each rev.

I looked through the file_column docs and found the :root_path option,
which I use in my models as follows:

class Foo < ActiveRecord::Base
if RAILS_ENV == ‘production’ then
file_column :image, {:root_path =>
“/home/www/rails-apps/myapp-externals” }
else
file_column :image
end
end

This is kludgy and I don’t like hard-coding a path, but this at least
gets file_column to store files outside my application’s root.

As far as uploading files goes, this is working fine. But
url_to_file_column still generates URIs that point to the directory
tree under myapp/public so of course my files aren’t available to the
browser.

How do I gracefully and maintainably fix this? It’s not simply a matter
of a redirect in my lighttpd.conf since the url_for_file_column uris
have paths that share namespace with controllers. The thought of making
an explicit redirect for every file_column-managed field seems
un-Rails-like in the extreme.

Any thoughts on how to do this in a way that won’t require changes to
lighttpd.conf every time I add or change a file_column field in my
schema?

Thanks.

-sk

2

On 1/17/06, Steve K. [email protected] wrote:

            file_column :image, {:root_path =>

As far as uploading files goes, this is working fine. But
url_to_file_column still generates URIs that point to the directory
tree under myapp/public so of course my files aren’t available to the
browser.

Looking in the source there is another config option, :web_root. Have
you tried using that in conjuction with :root_path? I’m still reading
the source to see exactly what it does, there is no doc for it but it
is listed as a config option.

# default options. You can override these with +file_column+'s

+options+ parameter
DEFAULT_OPTIONS = {
:root_path => File.join(RAILS_ROOT, “public”),
:web_root => “”,
:mime_extensions => MIME_EXTENSIONS,
:extensions => EXTENSIONS,
:fix_file_extensions => true,
:permissions => 0644,

  # path to the unix "file" executbale for
  # guessing the content-type of files
  :file_exec => "file"
}.freeze

–
Jon S.
[email protected]

3

Hi Steve,

On 1/18/06, Steve K. [email protected] wrote:

            file_column :image, {:root_path =>

As far as uploading files goes, this is working fine. But
url_to_file_column still generates URIs that point to the directory
tree under myapp/public so of course my files aren’t available to the
browser.

As Jon already mentioned, you could use the “:web_root” option. Set it
to the relative URL that is needed to reach the path you gave as
:root_path. Another possibility is to use a symbolic link that points
into your shared directory (same as for public/system). You can even
extend your switchtower recipes to automate creation of these links.
The switchtower docs will tell you more about how this can be done.

As far as I remember, there was a thread on this mailing list as well,
that covered, how to integrate file_column with switchtower.

Sebastian

4

Sebastian K. wrote:

As Jon already mentioned, you could use the “:web_root” option. Set it
to the relative URL that is needed to reach the path you gave as
:root_path. Another possibility is to use a symbolic link that points
into your shared directory (same as for public/system). You can even
extend your switchtower recipes to automate creation of these links.
The switchtower docs will tell you more about how this can be done.

As far as I remember, there was a thread on this mailing list as well,
that covered, how to integrate file_column with switchtower.

Sebastian

Thanks, guys. I ended up using

  1. :root_path on each of my file_column declarations in my models to
    specify the absolute path to the directory where I want the production
    server to put file_column files

  2. :web_root on each file_column model declaration to assign a URI
    prefix (“ext/” in this case), and then

  3. an alias in my lighttpd.conf pointing requests for the prefix to the
    absolute path.

In order to allow development to continue smoothly on Win32 with a
different directory tree, the :web_root and :root_path only get set in
the production environment.

I suppose it would be better to express the conditionals in the
environment files, but it’s working for the moment.

I will probably take Sebastian’s suggestion and change things to use a
symlink created by switchtower rather than a lighttpd.conf alias
directive to allow the server to get to the files outside the docroot.
The more that can be handled within rails rather than the webserver, the
better.

Given the momentum behind Switchtower, I think it would be a good idea
to create a standard location for asset directories that maybe get
auto-generated alongside an application’s RAILS_ROOT during development,
and get generated empty as needed via Switchtower, but are not part of
the tree managed by SCM. Not sure how that would work. Or if that’s too
complex given different dev and prod evvironments, there should at least
be a standard configuration directive for the production environemt that
contains an application-wide external asset path instead of sticking
things in public/.

Nu?

-sk