Rake up routes in Rails

RUBY ON RAILS

Jul 26 2017 · 1 minutes read

As a Ruby on Rails application grows it can be difficult to keep track which routes map to which controller and action. Rails attempts to combat this by relying on convention over configuration. This helps to reduce the cognitive load on an engineer. But a convention is just a convention.

What happens when the convention isn't followed? How do you quickly find which route maps to a controller action? Luckily Rails has the answer.

In Rails there is a Rake task that lists all of the routes. For each route it specifies the route helper, the HTTP verb and the controller action:

  $ bundle exec rake routes
               Prefix Verb   URI Pattern                              Controller#Action
       user_bookmarks POST   /users/:user_id/bookmarks(.:format)      bookmarks#create
   new_user_bookmarks GET    /users/:user_id/bookmarks/new(.:format)  bookmarks#new
  edit_user_bookmarks GET    /users/:user_id/bookmarks/edit(.:format) bookmarks#edit
                      GET    /users/:user_id/bookmarks(.:format)      bookmarks#show
                      PUT    /users/:user_id/bookmarks(.:format)      bookmarks#update
                      DELETE /users/:user_id/bookmarks(.:format)      bookmarks#destroy

Having all of this information in one place makes it trivial to trace requests in your application. The next time you need to find a route rake it up in Rails.