Removing Active Storage Routes from Rails 5.2

Rails 5.2 has landed and it brings some pretty cool new additions to the Rails stack.

However while upgrading one of my apps, I ran rails routes and noticed some new Active Storage routes had appeared:

       rails_service_blob GET  /rails/active_storage/blobs/:signed_id/*filename(.:format)                               active_storage/blobs#show
rails_blob_representation GET  /rails/active_storage/representations/:signed_blob_id/:variation_key/*filename(.:format) active_storage/representations#show
       rails_disk_service GET  /rails/active_storage/disk/:encoded_key/*filename(.:format)                              active_storage/disk#show
update_rails_disk_service PUT  /rails/active_storage/disk/:encoded_token(.:format)                                      active_storage/disk#update
     rails_direct_uploads POST /rails/active_storage/direct_uploads(.:format)                                           active_storage/direct_uploads#create

As I didn’t intend to have any uploaded content in this app, I wanted to remove them. The documentation unfortunately doesn’t mention much about these new routes. So I got digging through the rails core code & found a solution.

How to remove these routes

In your config/application.rb file, find the line:

    require 'rails/all'

And replace it with:

require "rails"

# Include each railties manually, excluding `active_storage/engine`
require "active_model/railtie"
require "active_job/railtie"
require "active_record/railtie"
# require "active_storage/engine"
require "action_controller/railtie"
require "action_mailer/railtie"
require "action_view/railtie"
require "action_cable/engine"
require "sprockets/railtie"
require "rails/test_unit/railtie"

What this will do is instead of requiring rails/all, it’ll just require the railties we’re planning to use.

By removing active_storage/engine, the Active Storage railties is no longer required and the routes it requires are no longer mounted. 👍

Undefined method `active_storage’

If you’re running into an error that looks a little bit like:

NoMethodError: undefined method `active_storage' for #<Rails::Application::Configuration

You have a reference to ActiveStorage in one of your config/application.rb or config/environments/*.rb files which looks like:

# Store uploaded files on the local file system (see config/storage.yml for options)
config.active_storage.service = :local

Remove that line and also the config/storage.yml if it is present, and you should be good to go.

Skip adding ActiveStorage on new builds

If you’re starting a new project and you’d like to skip having ActiveStorage be added from the get go, add the --skip-active-storage argument when you generate a new project. For example:

rails new AwesomeProject --skip-active-storage