How to write a channel.html file in Rails (for Facebook)

Question

According to the FB SDK I must include a channel file with the appropriate headers.

Being a major NOOB and a Rails not PHP developer I have no idea how to do this.

Here is the example they provide for php:

 <?php
 $cache_expire = 60*60*24*365;
 header("Pragma: public");
 header("Cache-Control: max-age=".$cache_expire);
 header('Expires: ' . gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time()+$cache_expire) . ' GMT');
 ?>
 <script src="//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>

I want to know how do I do the same thing in Rails 3

Answer 1

I got tired of polluting my routes.rb file in every facebook connected app so I wrapped a rack handler that gives the correct channel.html response in a Rails Engine and published it as a gem. You can simply include the 'fb-channel-file' gem in your Gemfile and it will be automatically mounted at /channel.html https://github.com/peterlind/fb-channel-file

Answer 2

Inside your controller:

cache_expire = 1.year
response.headers["Pragma"] = "public"
response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "max-age=#{cache_expire.to_i}"
response.headers["Expires"] = (Time.now + cache_expire).strftime("%d %m %Y %H:%I:%S %Z")
render :layout => false, :inline => "<script src='//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'></script>"

Answer 3

Use the response.headers hash in your controller. Docs

Example from your example

cache_expire = 60*60*24*365
response.headers["Pragma"] = "public"
response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "max-age=#{cache_expire}"
response.headers["Expires"] = ... # I'll leave this one to you.
                                  # (Or ask another Q.) 
               # gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s', time()+$cache_expire) . ' GMT');