play framework reading file from conf folder with routing - scala

Question

I have a web application with play framework. All images used in the application are kept in public folder and are accessed with the help of a routing defined in the conf/route file. So all the images I used are present in a jar file after build. But my requirement is that the admin will be placing few images that the UI should be able to access. For obvious reasons I can ask them to add images into the jar.
My plan is to ask the admin to add images to a folder inside the conf folder and read it from there using routing (I believe its possible because currently there is a routing defined that's reading a json from the config file).
# Home page
GET / controllers.Application.index
GET /clientConfig controllers.Application.clientConfiguration
GET /testImg controllers.Application.testImg
# Map static resources from the /public folder to the /assets URL path
GET /assets/*file controllers.Assets.versioned(path="/public", file: Asset)
Being totally new to Play framework I can't figure out a way to define routes for that and read images from a folder inside the conf folder . Any help is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

conf folder is a configuration folder so it's not a good idea to expose it as a public folder. For example from security perspective the application.conf or the database migration files contain sensitive data that shouldn't be accessible on any api endpoint.
What you could do is add an additional root folder to the public managed resources for example create a folder called publicImages in the root folder and add the following line to build.sbt
unmanagedResourceDirectories in Assets += baseDirectory.value / "publicImages"
Also remember that adding images to a folder on the deployed server means you won't be able to cluster, i.e. add additional nodes if/when load grows. So your best option is to use some 3rd party storage service, e.g. amazon s3 (it's pretty simple for the admin to upload images to a folder on s3)
If however you insist on adding the images to conf folder, what you could do is create a standard controller that accepts file name in its parameters (path) and stream the content of that file from the conf folder using
Play.getFile('conf/{myfile}') just make sure to enforce some security constraints like verifying no path is provided so malicious user can't traverse the machine's file system. And support only predefined 'safe' file types like images.

Answer 2

As LiorH said, it's usually not a good idea to expose conf folder to public. But if this is really what you want, then you can try to implement your own controller.
In your route file:
GET /configuration ConfController.loadConf(path)
In ConfController:
def loadConf(path: String) = Action {
Ok.sendFile(Play.getFile("conf$path"))
}