dynamic robots.txt file in Rails 3.x

We have a need for dynamic handling of robots.txt file as we have different requirements for production, staging, dev, test, etc.

Google-fu shows various way to do this, some for Rails 2.x, some for Rails 3.x. Here is my version.

First is to edit config/routes.rb and add this line:

match '/robots.txt' => RobotsGenerator

Then add the following to app_root/lib/classes/robots_generator.rb.

NOTE: We have an old domain, foo.com, that redirects to our newfoo.com. We don’t want foo.com to get indexed, so I have special treatment for that in production

class RobotsGenerator
  # Use the config/robots.txt in production.
  # Disallow everything for all other environments.
  def self.call(env)
    req = ActionDispatch::Request.new(env)
    headers = {}
    body = if Rails.env.production?
      if req.host.downcase =~ /foo.com$/
        headers = { 'X-Robots-Tag' => "noindex,nofollow" }
        "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /"
      else
        File.read Rails.root.join('config', 'robots.txt')
      end
    else
        "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /"
    end

    [200, headers, [body]]
  rescue Errno::ENOENT
    [404, {}, "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /"]
  end
end

Finally, you want to move public/robots.txt to config/robots.txt.

I want to give credits to the people that inspired my version.

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