In the last of these articles on the link shortener, I am going to discuss static assets.

There are two ways of serving static assets - through a webserver like Apache (Apache Webserver) or using Webmachine.

We’ll add some simple static serving capability to the project.

First off add the following directories to your project: assets/css

$ mkdir -p assets/css

into this new directory add bootstrap.min.css from (Bootstrap)

and an empty file shorten.css.

To the file templates/latest.html.mustache from the last post, add the following lines to the head section:

<link href="css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="css/shorten.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Once these changes have been made, add a new file into the lib/ directory: ShortenerStaticResource

defmodule ShortenerStaticResource do
  use Ewebmachine

  resource ['css', :filename] do

    resource_exists do
      dispath = :wrq.path_info(:filename, _req)
      filepath = "assets/css/#{dispath}"

      case File.stat(filepath) do
        {:ok, fileinfo} ->
          case {fileinfo.type, fileinfo.access} do
            {:regular, access} when access == :read or access == :read_write ->
              pass filepath != nil, filepath: filepath
            _ -> false
          end
        {:error, _} -> false
      end
    end

    content_types_provided do
      mime = :webmachine_util.guess_mime(:wrq.path(_req))
      {[{mime, :provide_content}], _req, _ctx}
    end

    defp provide_content(_req, _ctx) do
      {:ok, body} = File.read(_ctx[:filepath])
      {body, _req, _ctx}
    end
  end
end

The last thing that will need to happen is that the resource needs adding to the supervisor.

Change the lib/shortener_supervisor.ex:

supervisor(Ewebmachine.Sup,[[modules: [ShortenerStaticResource, ShortenerLatestResource, ShortenerShortenResource, ShortenerFetchResource],port: 18080]]),

Build and restart the project in the normal way:

$ iex -S mix

To test the page, you will need to add some content to the store.

ShortenUrlSrv.put_url("http://www.distortedthinking.agency")

Then in a web browser, navigate to http://localhost:18080/latest.

You should now see a rendered page. I am not vouching for the design, but this is easily cleaned up.