Creating a rails route to an external URL

Question

A lot of my users keep going to http://(rails app URL)/blog, but I don\'t actually have a blog. I finally setup a Posterous blog and now want to direct my users

Answer 1

Depends on the Rails version you are using.

Rails 3

# in routes.rb
match "/blog" => redirect("http://example.com/blog"), :as => :blog

Rails 2

# in routes.rb
map.blog '/blog',
  :controller => "a_helper_controller",
  :action => "redirect_to_blog"

# in a_helper_controller.rb
def redirect_to_blog
  redirect_to "http://example.com/blog"
end

Answer 2

For Rails 5:

get '/stories', to: redirect('/articles')
get '/stories', to: redirect('http://google.com')

Rails Guide source page

Answer 3

I know this is old, so in case someone else needs this for rails 4:

get "/blog" => redirect("http://example.com/blog")

Use get instead of Match in Rails 4, otherwise you'll get a Runtime error

Answer 4

Emulate frontend routes as regular Rails controller routes

Background : at the beginning there was Rails monolith rendering html view. Then came a frontend React app, and the need to convert the backend to a JSON api, and generate URLs (mostly in emails) pointing to a frontend app that behaves almost exactly like a Rails controller.

I was looking for a way to mimick the rails resource way to construct URL but to point instead to a frontend URL and generate appropriate path_helpers, that could be used easily with my app, RSpec, cucumber/Capybara, and everything else. I found this hack around routes to emulate frontend routes, which also requires an extra param to be passed to completely desambiguate frontend VS backend routes (useful in capybara testing)

frontend_scope = {
  as: :frontend,
  host: Rails.configuration.frontend_host, # like https://www.example.com
  port: Rails.configuration.frontend_port, # 443
  constraints: (lambda { |request| request.params[:app] == :frontend })
}
scope(frontend_scope) do
  root to: 'static_pages_controller#home'
  resources :articles, only: [:show, :index]
end

Then in my Ruby code I can use

frontend_article_url(@article, app: :frontend)
frontend_articles_url(app: :frontend)
... (and everything that can be generated in a classic rails app)

The inconvenient is that there will be a app parameter in your redirection, that you would have to ignore on your frontend app + all other web apps like Google Analytics, Search engine, etc*.

* the problem being, if you have both a /articles on your frontend and a /articles on your backend, your app will not be able to make the difference with both routes that resolve to the same URL without the help from an extra param