Ruby on Rails: Use slug instead of id on resource routes

Question

So I'm looking for a solution that would help me achieve the following with Rails resource:

/admin/articles/:slug/edit

as opposed to

/admin/articles/:id/edit

I'm looking for Rails resource routes and not the other kinds of routes.

Just wanted to know if it was possible. If so, how?

I think this is a copy of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/482636/fetching-records-with-slug-instead-of-id — sajinmp, Jun 25 '15 at 20:23
Consider a gem like friendly_id if you're building a production site, or at least check the readme to get an idea of the edge cases. https://github.com/norman/friendly_id — thebenedict, Jun 25 '15 at 20:31

Thomas Klemm · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-20T15:41:02.627

36

# config/routes.rb
resources :articles, param: :slug

In the terminal:

$ rake routes
...
article GET    /articles/:slug(.:format)      articles#show
...

edited Sep 20 '15 at 15:41

answered Jun 25 '15 at 20:22

Thomas Klemm

Are you sure that the param option is in Rails 3? – Dec 09 '15 at 14:25
Should be, but at least it is available in Rails 4+. – Thomas Klemm Dec 09 '15 at 18:44
1

Is this a "one-step" solution? i.e., once you add `param: :slug` your `link_to article.name, article`, for instance, will generate a link to a slug, and that slug will be recognized? Either the answer is no or I'm doing something else wrong :) – Jonathan Tuzman Jan 23 '19 at 23:04
@JonathanTuzman If the path then looks correct (e.g. `/articles/my-great-article`), you'll have to the controller to handle the slug param, e.g. `@article = Article.find_by!(slug: params[:slug])` – Thomas Klemm Feb 11 '19 at 13:51
1

@JonathanTuzman you need to add another method to the model to make sure, the changed parameter gets used with `link_to article`: `def to_param slug end` will make sure, the slug is used instead of the id. More can be read here: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html#overriding-named-route-parameters – orly Nov 17 '20 at 13:29

score 17 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 20 '15 at 15:43

The :id parameter in the routing is simply a placeholder and can be anything, from a numeric identifier to a slug.

You just need to pass the proper value

article_path(id: @article.slug)

and fetch the article using the appropriate method

Article.find_by!(slug: params[:id])

If you prefer, you can also override the to_param for the Article model to return the slug, so that you can use

article_path(@article)

and automatically the slug will be assigned to the :id parameter.

2 Answers2