Do even simple pages need routes in Rails?

Question

I wanted to make a simple page for a footer of a site discussing the team of the project. Such a page usually just has information and nothing too fancy.

I didn't make a route for it, and just basically saved it as team.html.rb in the folder: /app/views/team.html.rb

I am not sure whether that is the right place for such a file to be saved to. Where is the best place for such a one-off file?

Also, do I still need to make a route and a controller for this, or can I just skip those for such a simple page?

Thanks!!

have you tried loading that page, as in localhost:3000/team.html ? — mkro, May 24 '11 at 22:04

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:12

2

I'm using a controller to deliver static pages.

Here's a link to a similar question:

How to do static content in Rails?

What you can do also is put a static html file into the 'public' folder and refer to it like this:

http://localhost:3000/name-of-static-file

edited May 23 '17 at 12:12

Community

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answered May 24 '11 at 22:08

mkro

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 24 '11 at 22:12

I don't think that will work because Rails expects all requests to go through a controller. The simplest thing would be to do something like this at the end of your routes.rb:

match "/:action" => "pages"

Then in app/views/pages you can put your team.html.erb. You also will probably need at least a blank controller in app/views/pages_controller.rb:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
end

The nice thing about this is if you happen to need some dynamic content for one of the "static" pages you can just define a controller method to load it.

If this seems like overkill for your site, you might want a lighter framework like Sinatra

Probably what would work best for me is to define a StaticPageController and be able to correctly redirect the diff static page requests that come in. How could I do that? — GeekedOut, May 24 '11 at 22:28

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 24 '11 at 22:16

routes point to controller actions, not views.

a request to /team would (iirc) point to application#team. If that action doesn't exist, you will get an error. If you DO have that action defined (with a call to render, it will look in /app/views/application for a file called team.html[.erb|.json|.etc]

As the related thread points out, thoughtbot's high_voltage gem is great for a base of serving static pages.

Do even simple pages need routes in Rails?

3 Answers3