CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-rails
Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice

Reputation: 4425

How to serve a non static files in rails

I have an action, that generates a PDF files and save it in the /public/output.pdf.

When I set 

config.serve_static_assets = false

this file can't be found.

What's wrong ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 191

Answers (2)

Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice

Reputation: 4425

After testing, I came to this conclusion:

1) when using the command 

rails s -e production

Rails will only serve the statics files. Any other file created after you compile your assets will not be found.

To handle this, you need to execute your application under a web server like Apache, Nginx or other. These web servers will serve this files for you.

This looks to be obvious, but not for a beginner.

Upvotes: 0

d_ethier
d_ethier

Reputation: 3911

From the documentation:

"config.serve_static_assets configures Rails itself to serve static assets. Defaults to true, but in the production environment is turned off as the server software (e.g. Nginx or Apache) used to run the application should serve static assets instead. Unlike the default setting set this to true when running (absolutely not recommended!) or testing your app in production mode using WEBrick. Otherwise you won´t be able use page caching and requests for files that exist regularly under the public directory will anyway hit your Rails app."

Which means that if you set that to false Rails will not serve any assets from your public folder as it is assumed that a front-end web server (apache/nginx) will handle it. This lessons the load on Rails as the front-end server is much, much more efficient at serving files directly.

Upvotes: 1

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