Rails - Jan 2006 - Question about image storage and relative paths

I''m writing a website with a feature that hosts images that people
upload.

Right now, relative paths works within on my Windows box. So
specifically, I''m able to call File.open on
"public/images/somefile.jpg" and Rails/WEBrick understands that the
path is relative to the home directory of the project. This means that
"public/images/somefile.jpg" ends up referring to the absolute path
"c:\ruby\workspace\SomeProject\public\images\somefile.jpg"

The problem is now I''ve pushed this out to a Linux box running
Lighty/FastCGI and I get the error Errno::ENOENT with message:

"No such file or directory - public/images/somefile.jpg"

I found that if I prepend the public with the actual path - so,
/usr/local/rails/SomeProject/current/public/images/somefile.jpg" then
the entire setup works.

Any ideas on the best way to approach this?

In particular, a couple ways to fix this:
- Is there a method that returns the home directory of the app?
- Is there a method which complements image_path and tells me the file
system location of where a file should be saved?
- Is there a switch to force Rails to understand relative paths?

Let me know if you guys have any ideas.

Thanks in advance!

Andrew
(from Seattle, WA)

Andrew-

	The constant  RAILS_ROOT always refers to your rails apps root dir.  
So just make your paths like this:

RAILS_ROOT/public/foo

Cheers-
-Ezra

On Jan 8, 2006, at 6:09 PM, Andrew Chen wrote:
> I''m writing a website with a feature that hosts images that people
> upload.
>
> Right now, relative paths works within on my Windows box. So
> specifically, I''m able to call File.open on
> "public/images/somefile.jpg" and Rails/WEBrick understands that
the
> path is relative to the home directory of the project. This means that
> "public/images/somefile.jpg" ends up referring to the absolute
path
> "c:\ruby\workspace\SomeProject\public\images\somefile.jpg"
>
> The problem is now I''ve pushed this out to a Linux box running
> Lighty/FastCGI and I get the error Errno::ENOENT with message:
>
> "No such file or directory - public/images/somefile.jpg"
>
> I found that if I prepend the public with the actual path - so,
> /usr/local/rails/SomeProject/current/public/images/somefile.jpg" then
> the entire setup works.
>
> Any ideas on the best way to approach this?
>
> In particular, a couple ways to fix this:
> - Is there a method that returns the home directory of the app?
> - Is there a method which complements image_path and tells me the file
> system location of where a file should be saved?
> - Is there a switch to force Rails to understand relative paths?
>
> Let me know if you guys have any ideas.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Andrew
> (from Seattle, WA)
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>
-Ezra Zygmuntowicz
WebMaster
Yakima Herald-Republic Newspaper
ezra@yakima-herald.com
509-577-7732