Most appropriate way to generate directory of files from directory of template files with Rails and ERB?

My goal is to generate a directory of static html, javascript, and image files within my Rails (3) app, driven by ERB templates. For example, as a developer I might want to generate/update these files:

#{Rails.root}/public/products/baseball.html
#{Rails.root}/public/products/football.js

..from the following template files:

#{Rails.root}/product_templates/baseball.html.erb
#{Rails.root}/product_templates/football.js.erb

Ideally the templates would have access to my app's Rails environment (including URL helpers, view helpers, partials, etc.).

What's the latest and greatest way to accomplish this?

I experimented with a custom Rails generator, but found that 开发者_高级运维I needed to write custom logic for skipping non-ERB files, substituting file names, etc. There must be a better way.

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I'm not sure what you are trying to do exactly, that may help provide better answers, but here is some useful information:

You can call into erb directly, some information on that is here, which have probably already been doing:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/erb/rdoc/classes/ERB.html

For the list of template files an easy Dir.glob should be able to help find the specific files easily and loop through them:

http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Dir.html#M000629

The tricky part I wouldn't know how to advise you on is getting access to the helpers and other things Rails provides. The helpers that you write are just modules, so you could mix those in, something similar might be possible with the built-in rails helpers.

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This is interesting and related but doesn't directly answer your question, since its uses the Liquid templating engine instead of ERB, but otherwise, it does some of the static site generation you are talking about:

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

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This is how I accomplished something similar. It accepts source and destination directories, wipes out the destination, then processes the source directory, either ERB-processing files and placing them in the destination or simply copying them (in the case of on-ERB files). It would need to be modified to handle recursively processing a directory.

I invoke it from a rake task like so:

DirectoryGenerator.new.generate(Rails.root.join('src'), Rails.root.join('public', 'dest'))


class DirectoryGenerator
  include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
  include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
  default_url_options[:host] = 'www.example.com'

  def generate(source, destination)
    FileUtils.rmtree(destination)
    FileUtils.mkdir_p(destination)

    Dir.glob(File.join(source, '*')).each do |path|
      pathname = Pathname.new(path)
      if pathname.extname == '.erb'
        File.open(destination.join(pathname.basename.sub(/\.erb$/, '')), 'w') do |file|
          file.puts(ERB.new(File.read(path)).result(binding))
        end
      else
        FileUtils.cp(pathname, File.join(destination, pathname.basename))
      end
    end
  end
end

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Have you looked into Rails templates?

http://m.onkey.org/rails-templates for instance..

Not sure what you are getting at exactly.. are you trying to generate client sites by providing a few parameters.. that the end goal?