Rails will always look at the public folder and serve that if it exists. If someone goes to yourdomain.com/monkey.html, it will look first at the public folder to see if there is a file that matches. If not, it will look for a route that matches. If no matching route exists, Rails will raise an exception (throw an error.)
Here’s the conversion that prompted this post:
glennfu: I have this route in my routes.rb file: map.pages ‘/*path’, :controller => “pages”, :action => “show”
glennfu: but it’s catching too much… like my favicon and some stylesheets. How can I make it smarter?
melvinram: Are they (the favicon & stylesheets) in the public folder?
glennfu: yes
melvinram: Rails should look at the public folder first…
glennfu: perhaps that’s a clue, I’ll make sure they’re actually on the server…
glennfu: you spotted the problem, they’re actually not in the public folder!
glennfu: those files are missing
