How do I re-write this route to be shorter? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have resources :tags in my routes.rb.
So when I go to /tags/ios, it shows me the correct Tag#Show view.
What I would like to happen is when the user goes to /tags/iosit shows it as /ios and likewise I want that generated path to always be /ios (and not have the leading /tags).
Here is an example of how I am rendering that link, within an each block:
<%= link_to "#{tag.name}", url_for(tag) %>

Answer 1

In your routes.rb
resources :tags
match '/:tag_name' => 'tags#show'
Then in your tags_controller#show action you have access to the tag name via:
params[:tag_name]
Be sure to put that at the end of your routes file, as it will catch everything. Also, since it will catch everything you should render a 404 if it's not a valid tag name:
def show
unless #tag = Tag.where(name: params[:tag_name]).first
raise ActionController::RoutingError.new('Not Found')
end
end
To redirect /tags/ruby to /ruby:
match "/tags/:tag_name" => redirect("/%{tag_name}")
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html

Answer 2

well the problem here is namespace
if you define a route like
get "/(:slug)" => "Tags#show"
that will basically match anything where its a valid tag or not. The way I would do it would be
in your routes file:
begin
Tag.all.each do |t|
begin
get "#{t.slug}" => "Tags#show"
rescue
end
end
rescue
end
Then in your tags controller you can
def show
slug = request.env['PATH_INFO']
#tag = Tag.find_by_slug(slug)
end
My answer comes from another answer I wrote that you may be interested How to create app-wide slug routing for Rails app?

Answer 3

So even though I got lots of nice suggestions from these guys, I found what I think is the best solution for me.
All I am trying to do is basically make /tags/ruby be rendered as /ruby both in the actual URL on the links of all the tags, and in the URL bar.
I don't want to do anything that will add load to my app.
This is the solution that works for me:
resources :tags, path: "", except: [:index, :new, :create]
Using path:, you can specify what you want the path to display as. i.e. what do you want to appear before your resource. So if you wanted your URLs to look like myhotness/tags/ruby, then you would simply do path: "myhotness".
I didn't want anything in my path, so I just left it blank.
For what it's worth, you can even add a constraint to that route, like so:
resources :tags, path: "", except: [:index, :new, :create], constraints: { :id => /.*/ }