How do I get the rendered output of a controller's action without visiting the web page?

Question

As part of the deployment process for our rails 2.3 app, I'd like to save static versions of our error pages to the public folder. How do I get the rendered output of a controller's action without visiting the web page? I know it can be done because the functional tests do it - if I say

get :errors, :id => 404

then the body is in @response.body. I suppose I could just copy the code out of ActionController::TestCase, but I'm hoping that there's a simpler way to do it.

I wonder if page caching would work here so the page is generated on first hit, or are you concerned that a 404 means your app is pretty broken so you can't rely on the Rails stack? — Steve Ross, Nov 05 '10 at 19:03
Yeah - I want something to display if, say, all the mongrels are busy. — Simon, Nov 06 '10 at 09:57

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 08 '10 at 09:35

In the end I did just go into ActionController::TestCase, and this is what I dug out:

def get_content host, path, filename
  request = ActionController::Request.new 'HTTP_HOST' => host,
                                          'REQUEST_URI' => path,
                                          'REQUEST_METHOD' => 'GET',
                                          'rack.input' => '',
                                          'rack.url_scheme' => 'http'

  controller = ActionController::Routing::Routes.recognize(request).new
  response = ActionController::Response.new
  controller.process request, response
  return response.body
end

How do I get the rendered output of a controller's action without visiting the web page?

1 Answers1

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