How can I display an image whose path is outside my Ruby on Rails project directory using rails 3?

Question

how to display the image, which stored outside from the project directory?

Is there a simple way to do it?

Answer 1

I see two ways :

• On top of your rails server, in production and sometimes in dev, you have to use a web server like apache or nginx. With these, you can serve files from other directories for specific URL. EG you can make http://yourapp.com/images/ serving files from a specific dir. In rails, display the image with a traditionnal image_tag

Example with Nginx :

    # Find the right `server` section which you currently use to serve your rails app
server {
      listen 80;

      # Add this
      location /images {
        root /var/www/my/specific/folder;
      }

      location / {
        #...
        #... Here you should already some code to proxy to your rails server
      }
    }

With that, when you access to `yourserver.com/images`, nginx serve your specific folder and not your rails app. Then in your app view :

    <%= image_tag 'http://yourserver.com/images/my_pic.jpg' %>

• If you can't access your server settings, you can serve an image file from a controller action with send_file

  In a controller :

   class ImagesController < ApplicationController def show send_file File.join('/var/www/my/specific/folder',params[:name]), :disposition => 'inline' end end 

  In config/routes.rb

   match '/images/:name' => 'images#show', :as => :custom_image 

  Then when you access this action (via the route you defined in config/routes.rb ), you have the image. So in your view you do a traditionnal image_tag with this URL :

   <%= image_tag custom_image_path( 'my_pic.jpg' ) %> OR <%= image_tag custom_image_url( 'my_pic.jpg' ) %> 

Answer 2

If it's stored outside of the Rails app directory, then it does not belong to asset pipeline and you can simply link to it:

<%= image_tag("http://example.com/some_file.jpg") %>

Obviously it must be accessible through HTTP (you need nginx or Apache server installed).

Answer 3

This is probably bad idea and will lead to a bunch of issues. Some security, some functionality, but most of the effects I actually don't know.
I do know, from experience, that whenever you go against the rails conventions for what and where stuff is, it's a slippery slope of things breaking, best avoided.

Create a solution using the framework provided.

Note this functionality can also be affected a bit if you are using rails 3.1+ as opposed to <= 3.0 due to asset compilation which copies js, css and images into public.