Rails: generate a full URL in an ActionMailer view

Question

I'm using ActionMailer to send a sign up confirmation email. The email needs to contain a link back to the site to verify the user, but I can't persuade Rails to generate a full URL (including the domain etc).

I'm using:

<%= url_for :controller => 'login', :action => 'verify', :guid => @user.new_user.guid, :only_path => false, :host => 'http://plantality.com' %>

in my view

Part b:

In development mode Rails gripes if I don't specify the host explicilty in the link above. But I don't want to do this in production. Any solutions?

Answer 1

To solve the problem to pass a host for generating URLs in ActionMailer, check out this plugin and the reason why I wrote it.

To solve the first issue, use named routes when applicable. Instead of

<%= url_for :controller => 'login', :action => 'verify', :guid => @user.new_user.guid, :only_path => false, :host => 'http://plantality.com' %>

assuming the route is called login, use

<%= login_url(:guid => @user.new_user.guid) %>

Note, I'm using login_url, not login_path.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if it is what you want but in config/environments/development.rb you can specify default options for mailer urls

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = {
  :host => "your.host.org",
  :port => 3000
}

you can do the same in config/environments/production.rb

Answer 3

I don't know why the previous solutions seem so complicated, but since I'm here why not give my 2 cents...

Go to /config/environments and add:

config.absolute_site_url = 'your site url'

for the respective environment (ie. in development.rb, test.rb, or production.rb). Restart web server.

This allows you to call Rails.application.config.absolute_site_url to get the desired URL. No need for plugins or weird cheat, just store the site url as an application wide variable.