Play: additional public / assets directory

Question

In order to have a clean directory structure, I would like to make an additional assets folder public. I\'ve created a directory \'assets\' in my project folder, wrote an \'

Answer 1

I think the issue comes from the fact that the at method used is the default one used previously by Assets.

I ran into the same issue at some point last year, where I wanted to serve images that would be stored in a external folder, a folder that is somewhere on disk, and here is how I coded this:

I created a simple controller called Photos, that contained one Action:

object Photos extends Controller {

  val AbsolutePath = """^(/|[a-zA-Z]:\\).*""".r

  /**
   * Generates an `Action` that serves a static resource from an external folder
   *
   * @param absoluteRootPath the root folder for searching the static resource files.
   * @param file the file part extracted from the URL
   */
  def at(rootPath: String, file: String): Action[AnyContent] = Action { request =>
    val fileToServe = rootPath match {
      case AbsolutePath(_) => new File(rootPath, file)
      case _ => new File(Play.application.getFile(rootPath), file)
    }

    if (fileToServe.exists) {
      Ok.sendFile(fileToServe, inline = true)
    } else {
      Logger.error("Photos controller failed to serve photo: " + file)
      NotFound
    }
  }

}

Then, in my routes, I defined the following:

GET /photos/*file   controllers.Photos.at(path="/absolute/path/to/photos",file)

This worked just fine for me. Hope this helps.

PS: This was in addition to the normal Assets controller that helped serving js and css files.