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

pduey picture pduey · Mar 17, 2011 · Viewed 16.7k times · Source

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?

Answer

sandstrom picture sandstrom · Oct 17, 2011

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