Question

I have a few non-standard assets (i.e. files that are not images/javascript files/stylesheets such as json and binary files) that live within a mountable engine (without isolate_namespace) in app/assets/data. I want these to be part of the asset pipeline (in the same way as e.g. images).
I can add them to the asset paths collection, e.g.

class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
  config.after_initialize do
    Rails.application.config.assets.paths << root.join("app", "assets", "data")
  end
end

and I can see in the Rails console that the assets are visible to the asset pipeline (e.g. via Rails.application.assets[] and ActionController::Base.helpers.asset_path). For instance, for a file app/assets/data/foo.json, the asset_path helper in the rails console for the hosting app gives me a path assets/foo.json, however that path does not work, I get a

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

error.

How can I get the hosting Rails app to serve these files?

Answer 1

Turns out, this is some odd behavior with json files with specific names. The files in question are named something like schema-[UUID].json. Rails seems to think these are calls to some controller (even though there is no such route, nor a schema controller) that want json-formatted data back. When I rename the files to [UUID]-schema.json, they all of a sudden work.