Question

I am trying to choose an image randomly from a sub directory inside my /app/assets/images directory using the Dir.glob() command, and then display it with an image_tag. Somehow I can’t get it to work.

Here’s my code:

- @badges = Dir.glob("app/assets/images/badges/*")
= image_tag @badges.sample

Which produces the following error:

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets/app/assets/images/badges/produce.png"):

As you can see the asset pipeline is inserting an “/assets” in front of the directory. Alright Rails, I’ll meet you halfway here. So next I try removing /app/assets from the query path to make it work and get the following result:

- @badges = Dir.glob("images/badges/*")
  = image_tag @badges.sample

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets"):

What am I doing wrong here? Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Dir.glob is going to return images with a relative path, so your produce.png file will be returned as:

`app/assets/images/badges/produce.png`

However, you need to pass only the badges/produce.png part to image_tag. You need to remove the stuff before this:

= image_tag @badges.sample.gsub("app/assets/images/", "")

You may want to stick this in a helper instead:

def random_badge
  badges = Dir.glob("app/assets/images/badges/*")
  image_tag badges.sample.gsub("app/assets/images/", "")
end

and then in your view:

= random_badge