Rails 7: Downloadable files in folders outside project folder

I am working on a project in which users can create PDF files and then download them. Currently, I am creating these PDFs inside "public/" folder in the project. But, I want to change the path to a folder outside the project folder, but on the same server.

There is no problem in saving the files in this external folder, but, how do I allow users to download the files in the front-end. Is there a way to make files in external folder downloadable.

Basically I want this external folder to work same as "public" folder.

In Phoenix, there is a way to do this by adding a one line configuration that links external folder to project url. Is there something similar in Rails?

This is my first project in rails. So kind of lost.

It turns out that serving files from outside the root folder isn't much different from serving them from "public" folder. Here is what I did:

1. I created a folder to store the generated PDFs outside the project's root folder. And in my "environments/.rb" file, I added following configuration:

config.pdf_directory = "/home/deploy/pdf"

2. In the controller where I am generating PDF, I used "send_file" to return the generated file. (Since the request is already in the Rails stack, I guess it is okay to serve file like this here)

send_file(
    "#{Rails.configuration.pdf_directory}/#{pdf_file_name}",
    filename: "#{pdf_file_name}",
    type: "application/pdf"
)

3. In my index page, where I have a download link for users to download the file in the future, I have used Apache server configurations to server them from that folder directly

Alias "/pdfs" "/home/deploy/pdf"
<Directory "/home/deploy/pdf">
    Require all granted
</Directory>

I can now access/serve the generated files using the URL similar to: https://example.com/pdfs/file1.pdf