Play: additional public / assets directory

Question

In order to have a clean directory structure, I would like to make an additional assets folder public. I've created a directory 'assets' in my project folder, wrote an 'PictureAssets' controller which is nearly identical to 'controller.Assets', added 'assets' to the playAssetsDirectories in the build.sbt and tried following some route entries without success.

PictureAssets:

package controllers

import play.api.mvc.Action
import play.api.mvc.AnyContent

object PictureAssets extends AssetsBuilder {
   def create : Action[AnyContent]  =  Action {
      Ok(views.html.fileUploadForm())
   }
}

build.sbt

playAssetsDirectories <+= baseDirectory / "assets"

routes

# GET     /file                 controllers.PictureAssets.at(path="/assets", file="MM1.png")
GET     /datei/*file            controllers.PictureAssets.at(path="/assets", file)
# GET       /datei/*file            controllers.Assets.at(path="/assets", file)

If I try to access the URL, either nothing is displayed, or the error 'The image http:9000//localhost/datei/MM1.png cannot be displayed because it contains errors' is displayed or the css references to handled by the 'controller.Assets' don't work any more.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

I think the issue comes from the fact that the at method used is the default one used previously by Assets.

I ran into the same issue at some point last year, where I wanted to serve images that would be stored in a external folder, a folder that is somewhere on disk, and here is how I coded this:

I created a simple controller called Photos, that contained one Action:

object Photos extends Controller {

  val AbsolutePath = """^(/|[a-zA-Z]:\\).*""".r

  /**
   * Generates an `Action` that serves a static resource from an external folder
   *
   * @param absoluteRootPath the root folder for searching the static resource files.
   * @param file the file part extracted from the URL
   */
  def at(rootPath: String, file: String): Action[AnyContent] = Action { request =>
    val fileToServe = rootPath match {
      case AbsolutePath(_) => new File(rootPath, file)
      case _ => new File(Play.application.getFile(rootPath), file)
    }

    if (fileToServe.exists) {
      Ok.sendFile(fileToServe, inline = true)
    } else {
      Logger.error("Photos controller failed to serve photo: " + file)
      NotFound
    }
  }

}

Then, in my routes, I defined the following:

GET /photos/*file   controllers.Photos.at(path="/absolute/path/to/photos",file)

This worked just fine for me. Hope this helps.

PS: This was in addition to the normal Assets controller that helped serving js and css files.