Serving html(.erb) files from a controller - the easiest method.

June 7th, 2008

Suppose you'd like to have some "static" (as in html.erb, without content in the DB) pages on your Rails site. And to have some nice path, like mydomain.com/articles/somearticle, pointing to a file somearticle.html.erb somewhere in your app directory.

Well, this is the simplest and probably nicest of the options (and it's very "Ruby Way"). But I have to test it a bit more to clear some security questions - use at your own risk.

class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
  def method_missing(name)
    path = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/articles/#{name}.html.erb"
    render :file => path, :layout => true
  end
end

The best thing about it? 100% Globalize compatible, i.e. Globalize will automatically try to prepend extension with two-letter language code as usual with view files.

Posted by tomash Filed in ruby

1 Response to “Serving html(.erb) files from a controller - the easiest method.”

  1. Robert Nasiadek Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 11:44 PM

    Actually, if we’re ok with html files living in the app/views/articles directory, we can make it even simpler by doing it this way:

    def method_missing( name ) render :action => name end

    Didn’t try it out with globalize, but I believe it will work.

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