# Generating fully qualified URL based on the server

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-fully-qualified-url-based-on-the-server/134381>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 10, 2008, 11:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-fully-qualified-url-based-on-the-server/134381 "2008-04-10T11:47:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![subbu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@subbu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/subbu)\
**Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 11:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-fully-qualified-url-based-on-the-server/134381/1 "2008-04-10T11:47:05Z")

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Hi,

I have a cron job running at pre-determined time. This cron job is a  
small Ruby script that loads the whole Rails environment and does some  
jobs. One of the job is to send a link to users. The link needs to be  
full qualified. Meaning, it should be something like  
[http://ww.myapp.com/user/activate/asdfe234sv](http://ww.myapp.com/user/activate/asdfe234sv). The domain part in the  
URL is variable. The cron job could be running from dev or staging or  
production servers. How can I generate these URLs?

Named routes aren’t allowed in this Ruby script. To get to routes I  
have to do something like:  
::ActionController::Routing::Routes

But even with that I am not able to generate the link. I tried  
url\_for(:controller =\> ‘user’, :action =\> 'activate) and that doesn’t  
work either. Any ideas how I can do this?

At the moment I have hard-coded the domain part in the script file.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![subbu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/a88e57/32.png) [@subbu](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/subbu)\
**Post date:** [April 10, 2008, 12:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-fully-qualified-url-based-on-the-server/134381/2 "2008-04-10T12:10:48Z")

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where do you get the fully hostname from?

if you open the rails environment in a simple ruby script, you wont’  
have a hostname, you’ll have to specify it yourself. the url\_for()  
method ought to give you the relative path on the hostname that you  
need to get the rest of the URL.

Does this help?

Julian.

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