CakePHP Absolute Image URLs

Question

I wish to use the $html->image(...) helper function in CakePHP to output images, but I need it to produce an img tag using an absolute rather than relative URL (the resulting HTML will be downloaded and emailed round in a company newsletter). Is this possible?

It's not documented, but I notice from looking at the source code that the image function can take an array as its first argument. It's not entirely clear to me how to get this working though - a naive attempt to do it this way produces image URLs relative to the current page rather than within the webroot/img folder.

Solution 1

In CakePHP 1.x the method is:

$this->Html->image($this->Html->url('/path_to_image/image.png',true));

In CakePHP 2.x the method is:

$this->Html->image('/path_to_image/image.png', array('fullBase' => true));

Solution 2

The correct way to do this is in CakePHP 2.x:

<?php
echo $this->Html->image("logo.png", array('fullBase' => true));

Code pulled direct from the cookbook: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/helpers/html.html

Solution 3

$html->image('http://example.com/path_to_image/image.png'); should do the trick.

Comments

[Matthew Groves]

That should be CakePHP's motto :)

[JD Isaacks]

@Jleagle I updated my answer to specify the correct way in each version. (1.3 was the current version when I originally posted this answer)

[Vael Victus]

In Cake's case, it is expressly not.

[Matt]

What if I move my site to be on example2.com?