Acquire Asset Path from JavaScript

Question

I need to display images on an HTML5 canvas that are in the Rails asset pipeline, but I need to know the path for the asset from JavaScript. I'm using js-routes for other parts of the application, but it doesn't appear to provide a way to get the path to something in the asset pipeline.

What's the correct way to obtain the path to a Rails asset (e.g., an image) from JavaScript?

Answer 1

In the Rails Asset Pipeline guide, they give an example of coding assets in your stylesheets by preprocessing the stylesheets with ERB. You can use the same technique with JavaScript, assuming you tack an .erb to the end of the filename:

var someAssetPath = "<%= asset_path('some_image.png') %>";

Answer 2

In my case, I wanted to get the stylesheet path and the hash that rails generates for cache busting made it impossible to hardcode.

What ended up working quite well for me is to assign an ID to the main stylesheet link element in the html (layout) and then use javascript to extract the href. If you want the base asset path, perhaps create a generic element with the data you need as an attribute.

Rendered HTML

<link rel="stylesheet" href="mypath/main.css" type="text/css" id="main-css">

JS

$("#main-css").attr("href"); // "mypath/main.css"

Answer 3

Checkout the js_assets(Javascript helper in rails projects) gem. I think it is precisely what you need.

From the documentation:

Get the path to the template app/assets/javascripts/rubrics/views/index.html in javascript: var path = asset_path('rubrics/views/index.html')

Answer 4

For those using HAML you can do:

:javascript
   var assetPath = "#{asset_path('some_image.jpg')}";

Answer 5

Why not add a data attribute for the path inside an element in your .erb file and then retrieve that with JQuery?

inside some_template.html.erb

<%= content_tag(:div, "", id: 'some-id', data:{path_to_asset: asset_path("some_image.png")}) %>

then in some_javascript.js

var assetPath = $("#some-id").data("pathToAsset");

Answer 6

I came across the same issue in Rails 4.1 and used referencing rails assets in coffeescript for images. No additional libraries needed.