Asset mapping outside public folder on Play framework

Question

We have huge list of images that we need to store in an external path.. i.e outside of play application folder.

How can we make it available to play as an asset so i

Answer 1

A hacky solution would be to include in your sbt play public folder a symlink to the location you want to load the files. The symlink will be packaged in the assembly and will be functional at run time.

cd ~/your/playframework/awesome/project/public
ln -s '/var/lib/funky-data-set-for-my-awesome-project/' funky-data

Now you can use in your routes file something like:

GET         /funky/assets/*file                controllers.Assets.at(path="/public/funky-data", file)

The downside of this is that your stage/dev/prod environment must have that content you need at the same location.