Rails 3.1 asset pipeline: other assets on Amazon S3 demanding to be precompiled?

Question

So we've got our Rails 3.1(.1) site with assets in a few different places, and Rails (for some reason) expects those images hosted on Amazon S3 to be precompiled. The site-specific ones (stylesheets, little layout images, etc.) are local, they get successfully precompiled in production, and stored in public/assets, just like they should. They're served up via Apache just fine.

We have images that have URLs stored in the database that point at CDN-hosted images, and these URLs don't have a file extension; instead they have an MD5. They're http://path-to-cdn.com/<BIG-'OLE-MD5-HASH>. They're served through our views using Rails' image_tag helper just fine, they show up in production, they don't get sucked into our pre-compilation business (because they're dynamic, really, based on the product page on our site).

What's not fine are a third set of assets; they're stored on Amazon S3 with a similar hostname to where our site is served in production (the site is at, say, store.hostname.com and the assets are sitting at images.hostname.com.s3.amazonaws.com). When we visit a page with one of those images (and these images do have some sort of an extension; .jpg | .png | .gif, etc), we get a 500 error and a Sprockets error is filed about that image's URL not being precompiled.

I've seen some solutions where people feed a Proc to config.action_controller.asset_host, but I'm not sure that applies to my situation. I can't seem to find an answer to my solution.

Is there any way — besides writing the URL on the page to a raw HTML image tag (<img src=""/>) instead of a Rails image_tag? We'd really like to be able to use those nice helpers.

Answer 1

So from the comments it looks like the image urls in your database had whitespace as the first character which caused image_tag to look for an asset instead of linking straight to the url.