Thoughts

Using dashes in Rails 3 routes

I stumbled across this solution today, and I’m quite proud of myself because nothing broke (yet)! The default separator for URLs in Rails is an underscore. I don’t like underscores, at all. They don’t seem natural…some people may not care, but if I’m building something, I want full control over how things look.

This is a line in my routes.rb file:

match "business-locator" => "home#merchants"

business-locator is the URL that will be appended to http://localhost:3000 (for testing on your local machine), and http://yoursite.com for your live site (obviously). home is the folder where the HTML file for merchants is located.

These are lines in my home_controller.rb file:

def business_locator
  redirect_to "/business-locator"
end

Since Rails will give things underscores anyway, I defined business_locator with a redirect to the URL I want displayed, /business-locator. I am not sure if Rails 3 automatically adds a preceding slash to the URL I want, but it doesn’t hurt to include it yourself.

BOOM. I hope this helps another newbie like myself somewhere.