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

I used the idea of a generalized controller from the answers given, but I wanted to catch 404s, so I put an action in it to handle either case:

# app/controllers/static_controller.rb
class StaticController < ApplicationController
    def static_or_404
        render params[:static]
    rescue ActionView::MissingTemplate
        render :not_found
    end
end

and then at the very bottom in my routing:

# config/routes.rb
get '*static', to: 'static#static_or_404'

It serves the view from app/views/static of the same name as the path, and if there isn't such a view, it serves app/views/static/not_found.html.erb. One could also replace render :not_found with redirect_to root_path or anything else one wanted to have happen.