Michael Buffington wrote:
The URLs you pasted are identical so I'm not sure how relevant this
answer is, but here goes:
Whenever I reference images, I do so like so:
/images/image.gif (the first / being very important - it indicates
"starting at the base URL" or "from the root").
That way, regardless of what context the layout is executing in, the
browser will always look for the image off the root URL (like
http://127.0.0.1:3000/images/image.gif\).
The problem with this solution is it only works if your app is running as document root, which will be the case if you're running under Webrick, but not necessarily otherwise. If you want your app to be able to work correctly even when not installed under document root, use the image_tag helper function instead of absolute URLs. That is, instead of writing
<img src="/images/image.gif"/>
Write:
<%= image_tag "image.gif" %>
If your app is installed under somewhere other than document root, this will still expand to a valid url. See the documentation for the ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper module for other similar helper functions for javascript files and stylesheets.
Here's a more general helper function I use to generate links to any static file. Add this function to the ApplicationHelper module in app/helpers/application_helper.rb:
def link_to_file(name, file, *args)
if file[0] != ?/
file = "#{@request.relative_url_root}/#{file}"
end
link_to name, file, *args
end
Which you'd use like:
<%= link_to_file "Installer Program", "installer.exe" %>
Which would generate
<a href="/installer.exe">Installer Program</a>
under Webrick, but if your app is installed under Apache using FCGI, at say http://your.host.com/yourapp/, then the generated link would be
<a href="/yourapp/public/installer.exe">Installer Program</a>
without any changes to your code.
