Customizing Rails Routes

Customize the Router in Rails Application

There are different ways to customize Rails routes using various options which are described in this section. So before moving forward, let’s have a look about what options we are discussing in this section as below,

1. Customize route helper using :as
2. Restrict action by using :only and :except
3. Match route to have multiple actions using :match
4. Renaming routes URL using :path
5. Redirection of URL using :redirect

Customize route helper using :as

There are few scenarios where Prefix for defined routes needs to get changed and the scenarios could be various but some of them as below,

• Shortening Prefix as home_comment_review_path to hc_review_path as below,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes
  get ‘homes/comments_review_retweet’ => homes#retweet’
end

At terminal end,

$ rake routes | grep retweet
homes_comments_review_retweet GET /homes/comments_review_retweet(.:format) reviews#retweet

Now, this will give Prefix for review as, homes_comments_review_retweet which is too long and in case there is need of shorter name for it then it can be performed as,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes
  get ‘homes/comments_review_retweet’ => homes#retweet’, as: :retweet
end

Now the Prefix will become as,

$ rake routes | grep retweet
retweet GET /homes/comments_review_retweet(.:format) reviews#retweet

• Another important case is, naming routes to have specific Prefix in the case as below,

Let’s define a route as below,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes
  get ‘homes/:id/reviews => ‘homes#reviews’
end

Now this will tend to give routes as below,

terminal=>
$ rake routes
Prefix Verb   URI Pattern                  Controller#Action 
home   GET    /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#show
       PATCH  /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#update
       PUT    /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#update
       DELETE /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#destroy
       GET    /homes/:id/reviews(.:format) homes#reviews

As you can see, there is no specific Prefix for ‘reviews’ method route(last line). To have some specific Prefix along with it can be given as,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes
  get ‘homes/:id/reviews’ => ‘homes#reviews’, as: :reviews
end

Now this will tend to give routes as below,

terminal=>
$ rake routes
Prefix  Verb     URI Pattern                  Controller#Action
home    GET      /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#show
        PATCH    /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#update
        PUT      /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#update
        DELETE   /homes/:id(.:format)         homes#destroy
reviews GET      /homes/:id/reviews(.:format) homes#reviews

Restrict action by using :only and :except

Now, in case of defining a route with specific actions involved in it and not like default with all actions. In this case options like :only and :except comes in the role as below,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes, only: [:get, :post]
end

Then the routes available will be as below,

terminal=>
$ rake routes
Prefix  Verb    URI Pattern           Controller#Action
homes   GET     /homes(.:format)      homes#index
        POST    /homes(.:format)      homes#create

Similar to :only, we have :except to have all routes except the actions defined which can be given as,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes, except: [:get, :post]
end

Then the routes available will be as below,

terminal=>
$ rake routes
Prefix    Verb    URI Pattern            Controller#Action
home      GET     /homes/:id(.:format)   homes#show
          PATCH   /homes/:id(.:format)   homes#update
          PUT     /homes/:id(.:format)   homes#update
          DELETE  /homes/:id(.:format)   homes#destroy
new_home  GET     /homes/new(.:format)   homes#new
edit_home GET     /homes/edit(.:format)  homes#edit

The resulting route does not have ‘index’ and ‘create’ option as it is excluded using :except.

Match route to have multiple actions using :match

Most of the time a specific route method needs more than one action. At those time option like :match comes in role as below,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes
  match ‘homes/:id/reviews’ => ‘homes#reviews’, as: :reviews, via: [:get, :post]
end

It gives out the routes as below,

terminal=>
$ rake routes
Prefix   Verb      URI Pattern                  Controller#Action
reviews  GET|POST  /homes/:id/reviews(.:format) homes#reviews

Renaming routes URL using :path

Another case, when a URL (URI Pattern) needs to get changed for any particular route due to any reason, well it can be done by using :path option as below,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  resources :homes, path: ‘/home-track/home’
end

Then the available routes will become like as follows,

terminal=>
$ rake routes
Prefix    Verb    URI Pattern                    Controller#Action  
homes     GET    /home-track/home(.:format)      homes#show
          PATCH  /home-track/home(.:format)      homes#update
          PUT    /home-track/home(.:format)      homes#update
          DELETE /home-track/home(.:format)      homes#destroy
          POST   /home-track/home(.:format)      homes#create
new_home  GET    /home-track/home/new(.:format)  homes#new
edit_home GET    /home-track/home/edit(.:format) homes#edit

Redirection of URL using :redirect

Consider any random Rails project in which there are pages for various posts (/posts/:id) and there are some Google ranking associated with these pages, but due to some reasons the route content needs to get shifted/updated to articles(/articles/:id). In such cases, the option to keep google ranking same as well as shifting from posts to articles (keeping the page content of articles) can be done by using :redirect. As the name suggests :redirect, it redirects any specific route path to the desired route path as below,

config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
resources :homes
get ‘homes/:id/comments => ‘homes#comments
get ‘homes/:id/reviews => ‘homes#reviews’, to: redirect(‘homes/%{id}/comments’) # for Rails version>=4
end

So now whenever the URL as ‘homes/:id/reviews’ gets a hit, it will redirect to ‘homes/:id/comments’ and content from ‘comments’ page will show up.