I have searched around the web and there are answers that have helped me abit, however I am still stuck, so here goes.
I a Rails 4 app that allows users to create a biography/blog and then access it using their own domain.
Users can choose from several pre-made website templates (main page, about me page, my hobbies page, etc...), and then they load up their content using a CMS. The content will then be displayed using their chosen template when visitors visit their domain.
Eg:
User 1:
Domain: www.user1.com
Template: Template A
User 2:
Domain: www.user2.com
Template: Template B
Desired Results
When a visitor visits www.user1.com, they will see the main page. When they click on "About Me", they will be redirect to www.user1.com/about-me. If a visitor visits the "About Me" page for user 2, they will see www.user2.com/about-me.
My question here is, how do I set this up?
Based on this answer: Rails routing to handle multiple domains on single application
class Domain
def self.matches?(request)
request.domain.present? && request.domain != "mydomain.com"
end
end
------in routes.rb------
require 'subdomain'
constraints(Domain) do
match '/' => 'blogs#show'
end
I know I can route a different domain compared to mine to a separate controller, however, I need to route it to different template controllers which can change at any moment (users can change templates at will).
I know I can set up a general controller that can read incoming requests, then based on the hostname, I can extract the appropriate template and then redirect the request to that template's controller (eg: Template1Controller), however the url gets messed up, becoming something like "/template/template1/index" or "/template/template1/about-me" which is very bad and ugly. Furthermore, it will be extremely tricky to handle paths specific to only some templates (Template A might have a "My Resume" page while template B might have a "Family History" page instead).
Is there a way to do this?
I have thought about a method where I have a single controller that will handle everything (without redirects) and then just calls render template1/index, but I think it is a bad way of doing it (different template might need different data in each page).
Btw, this will be hosted on EC2.
EDIT
What I am looking to implement is quite similar to this question Mapping multiple domain names to different resources in a Rails app , but unfortunately no answers then. Im hoping 5 years later, someone might know how to get this done.
Thanks!
I do this pretty simple with Heroku. It's probably not hard anywhere.
Once you have DNS set up.. the Rails layer can look like...
Create a before_filter in ApplicationController. before_filter :domain_check
In my domain_check method I just have if request.host ~= /whatever/ do this elsif ... elsif ... end
"do this" can be a redirect or a render or whatever.
Related
I just realized I had a very hard to find bug on my website. I frequently use Model.find to retrieve data from my database.
A year ago I merged three websites causing a lot of redirections that needed to be handled. To do I created a "catch all"-functionality in my application controller as this:
around_filter :catch_not_found
def catch_not_found
yield
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
require 'functions/redirections'
handle_redirection(request.path)
end
in addition I have this at the bottom of my routes.rb:
match '*not_found_path', :to => 'redirections#not_found_catcher', via: :get, as: :redirect_catcher, :constraints => lambda{|req| req.path !~ /\.(png|gif|jpg|txt|js|css)$/ }
Redirection-controller has:
def not_found_catcher
handle_redirection(request.path)
end
I am not sure these things are relevant in this question but I guess it is better to tell.
My actual problem
I frequently use Model.find to retrieve data from my database. Let's say I have a Product-model with a controller like this:
def show
#product = Product.find(params[:id])
#product.country = Country.find(...some id that does not exist...)
end
# View
<%= #product.country.name %>
This is something I use in some 700+ places in my application. What I realized today was that even though the Product model will be found. Calling the Country.find() and NOT find something causes a RecordNotFound, which in turn causes a 404 error.
I have made my app around the expectation that #product.country = nil if it couldn't find that Country in the .find-search. I know now that is not the case - it will create a RecordNotFound. Basically, if I load the Product#show I will get a 404-page where I would expect to get a 500-error (since #product.country = nil and nil.name should not work).
My question
My big question now. Am I doing things wrong in my app, should I always use Model.find_by_id for queries like my Country.find(...some id...)? What is the best practise here?
Or, does the problem lie within my catch all in the Application Controller?
To answer your questions:
should I always use Model.find_by_id
If you want to find by an id, use Country.find(...some id...). If you want to find be something else, use eg. Country.find_by(name: 'Australia'). The find_by_name syntax is no longer favoured in Rails 4.
But that's an aside, and is not your problem.
Or, does the problem lie within my catch all in the Application Controller?
Yeah, that sounds like a recipe for pain to me. I'm not sure what specifically you're doing or what the nature of your redirections is, but based on the vague sense I get of what you're trying to do, here's how I'd approach it:
Your Rails app shouldn't be responsible for redirecting routes from your previous websites / applications. That should be the responsibility of your webserver (eg nginx or apache or whatever).
Essentially you want to make a big fat list of all the URLs you want to redirect FROM, and where you want to redirect them TO, and then format them in the way your webserver expects, and configure your webserver to do the redirects for you. Search for eg "301 redirect nginx" or "301 redirect apache" to find out info on how to set that up.
If you've got a lot of URLs to redirect, you'll likely want to generate the list with code (most of the logic should already be there in your handle_redirection(request.path) method).
Once you've run that code and generated the list, you can throw that code away, your webserver will be handling the redirects form the old sites, and your rails app can happily go on with no knowledge of the previous sites / URLs, and no dangerous catch-all logic in your application controller.
That is a very interesting way to handle exceptions...
In Rails you use rescue_from to handle exceptions on the controller layer:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
rescue_from SomeError, with: :oh_noes
private def oh_noes
render text: 'Oh no.'
end
end
However Rails already handles some exceptions by serving static html pages (among them ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound). Which you can override with dynamic handlers.
However as #joshua.paling already pointed out you should be handling the redirects on the server level instead of in your application.
I have been programming in Ruby on Rails for a while now, but never really dug deep into routing until recently. After reading a fair amount of documentation and googling, I haven't been able to answer this question.
How do you change a URL after a route is matched? To better explain this, let me set a scenario I'm trying to solve. The root of my website while testing is localhost:3000. My login page is localhost:3000/login. Once logged in though, I want the URL to read localhost:3000 again with no extension. The actual page name is dashboard and my route is as follows currently.
get 'dashboard' => 'user#dashboard'
This only matches when the URL is localhost:3000/dashboard, but I wan't to have cleaner URL like a lot of sites have. How is this achieved with Ruby On Rails? I want to avoid a javascript solutions or anything that is a workaround.
Any help or tips is greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.
I've provided the solution below, but I agree with max that your wanting to make a RESTful URL less meaningful is backwards. You should strive to alias a URL to make it more meaningful (e.g. from site.com/posts/34239482069472/ to site.com/posts/my-post-title).
The URL that appears in the address bar is an instruction to an app. When a user puts "site.com/dashboard" into the address bar, they're instructing the app to make an HTTP request get 'dashboard'. The Controller#action is a set of instructions the app executes when it receives that request. If you're following Rails naming convention then Users#dashboard will retrieve data and then by default render the view template at views/users/dashboard.html.erb. Understand this: you're not changing the URL for a given view, you're changing which view template is rendered by the Controller#action that is set for that url.
This means the Controller#action for your root_url (i.e. your root to: 'controller#action' in config/routes.rb) should render one view template if user is logged in and a different view template if a user is not logged in. Assuming root to: welcome#index, your controller action would look something like this:
app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb
def index
# db queries, logic, set #variables
if session[:user_id]
render "users/dashboard" # app/views/users/dashboard.html.erb
else
render "index" # app/views/welcome/index.html.erb
end
end
Note that if the view template you want to render corresponds to the controller, e.g. users_controller.rb action is rendering a view in views/users, then you only need to give the view name, otherwise you need to give a path (relative to app/views).
Why? /dashboard is a proper RESTful definition of a resource. In REST a route should have the same response independent of state. So having a radically different root page for a logged in user violates REST.
Also your users may want to access the index page as well the dashboard and you would be denying them that possibility.
These kind of URL micro-optimizations do not warrant hacking a bunch of state into your routes definitions.
I am trying to do different things on the home page of my application based on properties of the currently authenticated user. For example:
location, user, state, -> destination
/, no user -> a home page
/, user authenticated, state: unverified -> user profile page
/, user authenticated, state: verified -> a content listing
What this looks like is that I am trying to 'route' based on the current user's state (as represented by a state machine). These 3 actions already exist in 3 different controllers (I call them 'pages', 'users', and 'posts'), but while one can call another controller's view, one can't call another controller's action, making it a little tough to not repeat myself. There's a number of ways to deal with this, but I'm not sure what The Rails Way is for this, so I thought I'd ask. I see as my options:
Use redirect_to in a hypothetical 'redirect controller', but I want the page to appear under /, so this isn't what I want.
Get fancy with a routing constraint (not sure this is possible; need sessions/cookies available in routing and I'm not sure that's the case)
Pull the logic for the particular actions out of their respective controllers, toss them into ApplicationController, and use them directly based on the user's state in a hypothetical controller (or just toss it into pages).
Repeat myself significantly, either in the controller, the views, or both
Yet-unknown options, I'm open to suggestions.
I'm leaning towards the third option, with the obvious downside that some piece of those controllers will now more or less inexplicably live in the ApplicationController (unless, god help me, I do some sort of Lovecraftian include-on-extend). Having this code live in two places feels dirty to me.
Am I missing something obvious?
Would a single action that uses a helper to pick the right partial based on the current state of the user work?
Also, take a look at using ActiveSupport::Concern instead of getting all Lovecraftian include-on-extend. http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Concern.html
I'm building a referral program for my Ruby on Rails app, such that a user can share a link that contains their user ID (app.com/?r=ID). If a referrer ID is present when a visitor lands on app's homepage, the signup form on the homepage contains a hidden field that populates with the referrer's ID. The controller then detects the ID and creates a new referral in a referral table if the referred visitor signs up. It works, and here's that chunk of code:
#referrer = User.find(params[:r]) rescue nil
unless #referrer.nil?
#referral = Referral.new(:referrer_id=>#referrer.id)
end
Pretty simple stuff, but it's pretty easy to break (ex: if visitor navigates away from the homepage, referrer ID is lost). I feel like cookies could be a more robust method, where a cookie containing the referrer's ID is stored on the referred user's computer for x days. This is pretty commonplace, especially with affiliate programs like Groupon, but I have never worked with cookies and have no idea where to start.
Also, is there any good way to mask or change the URLs of the referral system? Instead of having app.com/?r=1842, I would prefer something like app.com/x39f3 <- a randomly generated sequence of numbers associated with a given user, without the ?r= portion.
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
To answer the cookie question, it's quite easy to set them:
cookies['app-referrer-id'] = params[:r]
And then it's the same format to read them back (but without the assignment). I would suggest putting this code in a before_filter in your application controller. This way, the cookie will be set irrespective of the page on which your visitor first lands on your site.
With regards to changing the structure of the urls to the suggested format, you would need to have the referral codes match a specific pattern, otherwise you are likely to run into routing problems. If, for example, they matched the format of 3 letters followed by three numbers, you could put the following your routes file:
match '/:referrer_id' => 'app#index', :constraints => {:referrer_id => /[a-zA-Z]{3}[0-9]{3}/}
The reference to app#index should be changed to the controller in which you handle referrals and you can access the referrer_id through params[:referrer_id].
Hope this is of some use.
Robin
I'd like to implement a special routing in rails based on the URI (I'm using rails 3.0.4 with Mongoid and devise). Let's say my user logins, once signin I want to redirect him to a private area for example http://www.mysite.com/site1. Many users could belong to site1, many to site2... users of one site are not authorized to see another site. Today the redirection is fine after sign in, but I'm confused on how I should implement siteX (each site has its own data). I have the following route:
match '/:site_name' => 'site#index', :constraints => { :site_name => /'a pattern'/ }
resources :sites do
end
Because I need to stick to this URI format should I nest all my other resources inside :sites? For example if I want to display order 1 of site 2 the URL should look like http://www.mysite.com/site2/order/1. I can't put the resource's name "sites" in the URI as it starts directly with the identifier. Is there another way of doing this, what would be the best pratices? Hope my explanations make sense.
Thanks a lot for all your help!
Ted
I recommend you scrap the idea of "subdirectories". You'll have (not insurmountable) difficulties with link_to and the other helpers.
I would setup subdomains (a la, site1.mysite.com) if that's possible for your situation
Doing url.com/site_name is kind of nuts.
If only one user can belong to a site, take it from the user perspective then and use resource and not resources.
E.g., url.com/orders would be all current_user.orders, since current_user has_one site (or is a member of one site).
If you need site specific navigation, then draw from /site_name for site specific detail that is public in nature. E.g., url.com/site_name/pricing
If you really want to break your site down into /site_name specific routes, then through that into a subdomain. You can even try using sudomain devise to get you started.