Routes with Dash `-` Instead of Underscore `_` in Ruby on Rails

90
votes

I want my urls to use dash - instead of underscore _ as word separators. For example controller/my-action instead of controller/my_action.

I'm surprised about two things:

  1. Google et al. continue to distinguish them.
  2. That Ruby on Rails doesn't have a simple, global configuration parameter to map - to _ in the routing. Or does it?

The best solution I've is to use :as or a named route.

My idea is to modify the Rails routing to check for that global config and change - to _ before dispatching to a controller action.

Is there a better way?

4
ruby-on-railsroutingrails-routing
I also prefer dashes to underscores in urls (as well as in html/css element ids, names, and classes), but I haven't tried to implement it. I would migrate to rails 3 first and then worry about this because rails 3 has a lot of drastic upgrades to middleware and routing. – yfeldblum
Thanks Justice. I'll hold off until I upgrade and get familiar with v3. – pduey
See this article about Hyphenated Routes in Rails – Yarin

4 Answers

81
votes

With Rails 3 and later you can do like this:

resources :user_bundles, :path => '/user-bundles'

Another option is to modify Rails, via an initializer. I don't recommend this though, since it may break in future versions (edit: doesn't work in Rails 5).

Using :path as shown above is better.

# Using private APIs is not recommended and may break in future Rails versions.
# https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/4-1-stable/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/routing/mapper.rb#L1012
#
# config/initializers/adjust-route-paths.rb
module ActionDispatch
  module Routing
    class Mapper
      module Resources
        class Resource
          def path
            @path.dasherize
          end
        end
      end
    end
  end
end
5
votes

You can overload controller and action names to use dashes:

# config/routes.rb
resources :my_resources, path: 'my-resources' do
  collection do
    get 'my-method', to: :my_method
  end
end

You can test in console:

rails routes -g my_resources
my_method_my_resources GET  /my-resources/my-method(.:format) my_resources#my_method
2
votes

You can use named routes. It will allow using '-' as word seperators. In routes.rb,

map.name_of_route     'a-b-c',       :controller => 'my_controller', :action => "my_action"

Now urls like http://my_application/a-b-c would go to specified controller and action.

Also, for creating dynamic urls

map.name_of_route    'id1-:id2-:id3',       :controller => 'my_controller', :action => "my_action"

in this case 'id1, id2 & id2 would be passed as http params to the action

In you actions and views,

name_of_route_url(:id1=>val1, :id2=>val2, :id3=>val3)

would evaluate to url 'http://my_application/val1-val2-val3'.

2
votes

if you use underscores in a controller and view file then just use dashes in your routes file, and it will work..

get 'blog/example-text' this is my route for this controller

def example_text end <-- this is my controller

and example_text.html.erb is the file

and this is the actual link site.com/blog/example-text

i figured this is works for me, and it's more effective than underscores SEO wise