Question

I’m trying to render a dynamic text file (robots.txt) in my Rails (3.0.10) app, but it continues to render it as HTML (says the console).

match 'robots.txt' => 'sites#robots'

Controller:

class SitesController < ApplicationController

  respond_to :html, :js, :xml, :css, :txt

  def robots
    @site = Site.find_by_subdomain # blah blah
  end

end

app/views/sites/robots.txt.erb:

Sitemap: <%= @site.url %>/sitemap.xml

But when I visit http://www.example.com/robots.txt I get a blank page/source, and the log says:

Started GET "/robots.txt" for 127.0.0.1 at 2011-11-21 11:22:13 -0500
  Processing by SitesController#robots as HTML
  Site Load (0.4ms)  SELECT `sites`.* FROM `sites` WHERE (`sites`.`subdomain` = 'blah') ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 1
Completed 406 Not Acceptable in 828ms

Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Note: I added this to config/initializers/mime_types, cause Rails was complaining about not knowing what the .txt mime type was:

Mime::Type.register_alias "text/plain", :txt

Note 2: I did remove the stock robots.txt from the public directory.

Answer 1

I think the problem is that if you define respond_to in your controller, you have to use respond_with in the action:

def robots
  @site = Site.find_by_subdomain # blah blah
  respond_with @site
end

Also, try explicitly specifying the .erb file to be rendered:

def robots
  @site = Site.find_by_subdomain # blah blah
  render 'sites/robots.txt.erb'
  respond_with @site
end