loading css files within a static website in heroku - ruby

Question

My config.ru is as follows:
use Rack::Static,
:urls => ["/images"],
:root => "public"
run lambda { |env|
[
200,
{
'Content-Type' => 'text/html',
'Cache-Control' => 'public, max-age=86400'
},
File.open('public/index.html', File::RDONLY)
]
}
When I load it locally the website looks fine, but when I run it on Heroku I get the following error message in the browser console for the CSS files:
Resource interpreted as Stylesheet but transferred with MIME type text/html.
Any idea why I am getting these errors?
Example site: http://salus8.heroku.com.

Answer 1

Your app currently responds to requests in two different ways. Requests starting with /images are served by searching the /public/images folder and returning any file matching the request. Any other request is served by running the lambda block, which returns your index.html file with a content type of text/html.
This applies to any other request, so when your page references a css file and the browser tries to fetch it, your app will return the index.html page with the HTML content type, hence the warning about MIME type.
One way to fix this would be to add /css to the list of urls the Static middleware handles:
use Rack::Static,
:urls => ["/images", "/css"],
:root => "public"
and put your css files in the public/css directory (as I write, it looks like you have already done this).
This would solve your immediate problem, but you might have issues for example if you wanted to have more than one HTML page in the top directory.
Another solution to achieve a static site that serves index.html to any requests with no path, which is what it looks like you're trying to do here, could be to use the rack-rewrite gem and a Rack::File application. Add gem 'rack-rewrite' to your Gemfile, and then use a config.ru like this:
require 'rack/rewrite'
use Rack::Rewrite do
rewrite "/", "/index.html"
end
run Rack::File.new("public")
This will respond to all requests with the matching file (if it exists), and any requests that arrive with no path will get index.html. (Note that it won’t serve index.html for requests for subdirectories under the main directory).
If you’re using Heroku’s Cedar stack, you could also look into faking a php app in order to get “real” static hosting with Apache.
I don’t know why this would be working locally but not on Heroku, unless you’re just opening the files directly in the browser. Are you running a server locally (e.g. with rackup), or looking at the files direct?