Why am I getting error for apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png

Question

I have created a new rails3 project but I am seeing following logs many times in my server logs. Why I am getting these request and how can I avoid these?

Answer 1

Note that this can happen even when the user has NOT bookmarked the site to their iOS home screen - for example, any time you open a page using Chrome for iOS, it does a GET "/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png".

I've handled this and other non-HTML 404 requests in my ApplicationController as follows:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html { render :template => "error_404", :layout => "errors", :status => 404 }
  format.all { render :nothing => true, :status => 404 }
end

The format.all response takes care of images such as this PNG file (which does not exist for my site).

Answer 2

If you ended here googling, this is a simple configuration to prevent this error full the web server logs:

Apache virtualhost

Redirect 404 /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png
<Location /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png>
    ErrorDocument 404 "apple-touch-icon-precomposed does not exist"
</Location>

Nginx server block:

location =/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png {
        log_not_found off;
        access_log off;
}

PS: Is possible you want to add apple-touch-icon.png and favicon.ico too.

Answer 3

Simply create zero-sized files called the appropriate names.

The request will be satisfied with no additional data transfer nor further logging lines.

Answer 4

An alternative solution is to simply add a route to your routes.rb

It basically catches the Apple request and renders a 404 back to the client. This way your log files aren't cluttered.

# routes.rb at the near-end
match '/:png', via: :get, controller: 'application', action: 'apple_touch_not_found', png: /apple-touch-icon.*\.png/

then add a method 'apple_touch_not_found' to your application_controller.rb

# application_controller.rb
def apple_touch_not_found
  render  plain: 'apple-touch icons not found', status: 404
end

Answer 5

I guess apple devices make those requests if the device owner adds the site to it. This is the equivalent of the favicon. To resolve, add 2 100×100 png files, save it as apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png and apple-touch-icon.png and upload it to the root directory of the server. After that, the error should be gone.

I noticed lots of requests for apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png and apple-touch-icon.png in the logs that tried to load the images from the root directory of the site. I first thought it was a misconfiguration of the mobile theme and plugin, but found out later that Apple devices make those requests if the device owner adds the site to it.

Source: Why Webmasters Should Analyze Their 404 Error Log (Mar 2012; by Martin Brinkmann)