Can I Render A Layout Directly From routes.rb, Without A Controller?

Question

I would like to set up a pair of style guides for the admin and public sections of a website.

Each will need its own layout which will contain a mixture of static html and calls to erb partials (so a static page won't cut it). I have no need of a controller(s) to serve these pages and I don't want what is effectively development-only content cluttering up the rest of the code. This got me wondering whether there is a way to render a layout directly.

Disclaimer: I appreciate this is not something I should do often/ever and I know there are a wealth of arguments for why this is a bad idea. I am interested in whether this is possible.

Is there a way for me to render a layout directly from routes.rb without going through a controller?

Answer 1

For some weird reason I wanted to render a blank JS file for a while, and writing a controller felt like too much for this kind of hack. Thanks to @genkilabs 's answer, I used this 3 liner:

get 'analytics/some_file.js', to: -> (env) do
  [200, { 'Content-Type' => 'application/javascript' }, ['']]
end

Answer 2

I wanted to do something really stupid once, so if you do too, try this working example.

match :movedpage, :to => proc { |env|
    if Rails.env.production?
        @remote_path = 'http://productionhost.com'
    elsif Rails.env.staging?
        @remote_path = 'http://staginghost.com'
    else
        @remote_path = 'http://localhost:3000'
    end
    [
        200,
        {"Content-Type" => "text/html"},
        [File.read("public/moved_page.html").gsub('@remote_path', @remote_path)]
    ]
}, :via => :all

Where moved_page.html was a static page asking people up update their bookmarks and @remote_path just typed in a link like <a href="@remote_path">@remote_path</a>. Note that <%= %> won't work because you don't have view helpers in there.

So, theres enough rope to get yourself in trouble ^_^