Using absolute paths for images

Rails
1

Hi all,

I want to make images stored on my filesystem available to a Rails
app, even if they are outside the Rails directory. For example, if my
app is in /home/adam/rails_app/my_app I want to display an image from /
home/adam/Pictures without having to copy the picture into the app
public/images directory. When I try this, using the absolute path of
the file, I get a routing error:

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches “/home/adam/Pictures/
my_pic.jpg” with {:method=>:get})

This is using image_tag with an absolute file path “/home/adam/
Pictures/my_pic.jpg”. Even if I use a simple HTML img tag, the image
is not displayed. Is it possible to bypass Rails routing and get
access to these files?

Many thanks,
Adam

2

On Jun 11, 2008, at 4:00 PM, Adam wrote:

I want to make images stored on my filesystem available to a Rails
app, even if they are outside the Rails directory. For example, if my
app is in /home/adam/rails_app/my_app I want to display an image
from /
home/adam/Pictures without having to copy the picture into the app
public/images directory. When I try this, using the absolute path of
the file, I get a routing error:

I use symbolic links to similarly deal with download files. I don’t
want the downloads to be part of the Rails project, so they’re
managed separately under another path. To make them available to
Rails, I put a symbolic link in the /public folder. Your deploymemt
script can deal with refreshing the symbolic link each time the app
is updated/redeployed.

– gw

3

you can set a default root directory if there is only one folder for all
the images outside ur rails app

but i would recommend you to put the image in the same application since
if you are going to deploy that going forward…thats the right method to
do…

Dhaval P.
Software Engineer

sales(AT)railshouse(DOT)com

4

A solution would be apache frontend and using Alias

Alias /my_images /this/is/the/images/directory
<Directory “/this/is/the/images/directory”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

This will remove the image handling from rails and let apache do what
apache does…

5

Thanks all, symlinks worked perfectly for what I’m trying to do.

On 12 Jun, 07:14, Dhaval P. [email protected]