how to set up and use a Rails routes prefix

Question

When running rake routes I see:

 Prefix   Verb   URI Pattern                                       Controller#Action
 articles  GET    /articles(.:format)               


        

Answer 1

The prefix can be used with the route helpers to generate routes in your application. So in your application, the articles_path helper generates a route for articles index page, new_article_path is the route for the new article page, and article_path(@article) would be the route for the show page for @article.

To specify a different route, you could change your routes.rb file to:

resources :articles, as: :documents

That will give you:

documents  GET    /articles(.:format)                               articles#index
new_document GET    /articles/new(.:format)                           articles#new

I might consider changing the resource name to documents as it can get confusing when you rename routes and get a mix of terminology between the route and the controller.