image_tag weirdness - dodgy return value - HELP PLEASE!!

rubyonrails-talk
1

Max,

Although from your rails app you can read/right anything on your system, your web server has limited access to you system (for good security reasons). I am running on a windows sytem with InstantRails, but the principles are the same.

You need to know what the "public" directory is for your web server. For my InstantRails setup thats c:\InstantRails\rails_apps\app_name \public. That means all the assets/content/images I want my web server to serve need to be under that directory. It looks like this is not the case for you.

Then my image tags are referenced with the idea the "/" is actually "c: \InstantRails\rails_apps\app_name\public". For example, I store my images in c:\InstantRails\rails_apps\app_name\public\catalog\images. My image_tags are all <%= image_tag /catalog/images/.... %>

So I think your problems may be solved be (a) knowing what your public directory is for your web server configuration, (b) putting your content under that directory and (c) image_tag'ing based on that public directory being the root directory.

Cheers, --Kip

2

Max, I haven't been down this path before. I use ImageMagick but not its tag helper. I had a quick read of the docs and have a couple of things for you at least to think about.

1. helper has full access to the data on your machine since its part of your Rails apps. So pathname you give it need to be real system path names (not web server relative).

2. The helper is going to take your existing fille (like "flower.jpeg") then apply some transformation.

3. It is going to have to save that transformed file somewhere so the web server can serve it. It looks like that it saves the resulting file in appname/imagemagick. But of course as you've worked out thats not available to your web server.

So I guess the issue is how to have the helper save content it has transformed into a place the web server can see.

Hope this helps a little,

--Kip