Imagine you have a fruit shop application built in Ruby on Rails. As a Rails developer, you know that to get to a specific fruit page, a URL like www.myfruitshop/1 will work - but it’s more user friendly to use something like this:
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www.myfruitshop/banana
This article will show you how to implement this in a Ruby on Rails application.
First, create an application and fruit model to implement the functionality.
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rails new fruits-app
cd fruits-app
rails generate scaffold Fruit name slug:uniq:index
rails db:create db:migrate
In your Gemfile, add the friendly_id gem.
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gem 'friendly_id', '~> 5.2.4'
Now run the following command to generate the config file and a new migration:
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rails generate friendly_id
Run the following commands:
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bundle install
rails db:migrate
In app/models/fruit.rb, make sure you have the following lines:
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extend FriendlyId
friendly_id :name, use: :slugged
In app/controllers/fruits_controller, make sure your set_fruit method looks like this:
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def set_fruit
@fruit = Fruit.friendly.find(params[:id])
end
Remove the following lines from app/views/fruits/_form.html.erb:
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<div class="field">
<%= form.label :slug %>
<%= form.text_field :slug %>
</div>
Now go to http://localhost:3000/fruits and click New Fruit. Add a new fruit and it will redirect you to http://localhost:3000/fruits/banana.
The application is now using Friendly IDs!