How to do static content in Rails?

Question

Looking at different options:

One is to just put the static pages in the public/ folder, but I do want the header from layout/application to be consistent.

I

Answer 1

Rendering an action doesn't make sense. You'll want to render a template (or a file) with a layout.

# Path relative to app/views with controller's layout
render :template => params[:path]

# ... OR

# Absolute path. You need to be explicit about rendering with a layout
render :file => params[:path], :layout => true

You could serve a variety of different templates from a single action with page caching.

# app/controllers/static_controller.rb
class StaticController < ApplicationController
  layout 'static'

  caches_page :show

  def show
    valid = %w(static1 static2 static3)
    if valid.include?(params[:path])
      render :template => File.join('static', params[:path])
    else
      render :file   => File.join(Rails.root, 'public', '404.html'), 
             :status => 404
    end
  end
end

Lastly, we'll need to define a route.

# config/routes.rb
map.connect 'static/:path', :controller => 'static', :action => 'show'

Try accessing these static pages. If the path doesn't include a valid template, we'll render the 404 file and return a 404 status.

• http://localhost:3000/static/static1
• http://localhost:3000/static/static3
• http://localhost:3000/static/static2

If you take a look in app/public you'll notice a static/ directory with static1.html, static2.html and static3.html. After accessing the page for the first time, any subsequent requests will be entirely static thanks to page caching.