how to get vanity urls in rails

17 Apr 2011

Getting vanity urls to work in rails is very simple. Let's say you want to allow your users to expose their Profiles through a facebook like url http://www.facebook.com/GreenDay. This is what you need to change in your routes file.

The except => :show on line#5 makes the resources helper skip the show route. And line#9 which should be at the end of the routes file, creates a route called profile which will be used for all the profile show links automatically. That's it now your application has vanity urls, whenever someone clicks on a profile#show link they will be taken to /:slug. Obviously in this case the slug is assumed to be unique.

Funky::Application.routes.draw do
  .
  .
  .
  resources :profiles, :except => [:show]
  .
  .
  #at the end of the routes file
  get ':slug' => 'profiles#show', :as => 'profile'
end

Update

One of the readers emailed me asking what the controller code would look like. Here it is:

#app/models/profile.rb
class Profile < ActiveRecord::Base
  #should have a column called "slug"
end
#app/controllers/profiles_controller.rb
class ProfilesController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @profile = Profile.find_by_slug(params[:slug])
  end
end

References