Rails Heroku How to Tell if an Image File Exists in the

Question

I'm using rails 6.1.4 and ruby 3.1.1

My app is on Heroku. I have several images in my assets/images directory, but I cannot get some of them to show when I deploy to live. Other images in the app show, so I'm betting the ranch it's a code thing on my part. All images show on my local machine.

The app matches an image in assets/images/badges/ with an image_name in the Badge model. Currently there is NOT an image in assets/images/badges/ for every Badge.image_name.

A helper gets the images that match the image_names and send the names to the view in an array. But, if an image does not exist, I do not want to show a broken-image icon. So, I use if Rails.application.assets.find_asset(image_path) != nil to test for the image's existence, before adding it to the array. My guess is this is the problem area and I don't know how else to test for an image being in the assets/images/badges directory.

Code:

app/images/badges/ (just listing 3 here)

boxing-1-bronze-150.png
boxing-1-gold-150.png
boxing-1-silver-150.png
...

I've logged into heroku and can list the app/images/badges directory and I see these images are there and are named correctly.

badges_helprer.rb

badge_images = []

if badges 
  badges.uniq!
  badges.each do |b|
    image_path = "badges/#{b.image_name}"
    if Rails.application.assets.find_asset(image_path) != nil
      badge_images << image_path
    end
  end
end

return badge_images

View:

students/show

<% badges = get_badges_for_student(@student) %>

 <% if badges %>

   <% b_count = 0 %> 
   <% badges.each do |b| %>
     <% if b_count == 3 %>  <!-- 3 images per row -->
       <br />
       <% b_count = 0 %>
     <% end %>
     <%= image_tag(b) %>
     <% b_count += 1 %>
   <% end %>

  <% end %>

As a test on my show view, I created an image tag for one of the images I know is there.

<p>Test: <%= image_tag("badges/boxing-1-gold-150.png") %></p>

It shows, so I go back to the helper page and am betting the line: if Rails.application.assets.find_asset(image_path) != nil is not working the way I think it should.

Is there a better way to test for an image file in the assets/images/badges/ directory.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I found that this works:

if File.exists?(Rails.root.join('app','assets','images','badges',image_name))

Note: Rails.root on Heroku shows app-name/app so the above Rails.root.join('app','assets','images','badges',image_name) displays app/app/assets... when I print it out in a view. odd!! But I guess it knows how to navigate to the correct path.