[Proposal] Add --json option to rails routes command

rubyonrails-core
1

Impetus

It would be nice to have --json available for rails routes so that it can be used for programmatic access. It would make parsing the existing routes output less error prone, which is great for tools like this vscode extension. I also think it would be beneficial to include the source location for the controller action as well, as that is also useful for extension development. Apart from extension development, I think it would also be useful for generating static docs based off of it. That is currently already possible without custom parsing of the existing format of course, but it’s a lot easier to just deserialize JSON.

Implementation

Here is a first-attempt at an implementation to add it.

If you spin up a brand new rails project and set your routes.rb to:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get "up", to: "rails/health#show", as: :rails_health_check
  get "service-worker", to: "rails/pwa#service_worker", as: :pwa_service_worker
  get "manifest", to: "rails/pwa#manifest", as: :pwa_manifest
  namespace :admin do
    resources :users
  end
end

Then running bin/rails routes --json will give you output that looks like this:

[
  {
    "prefix": "",
    "verb": "",
    "uri": "/assets",
    "controller": {
      "name": "Propshaft::Server",
      "class": "Propshaft::Server",
      "action": null,
      "source_location": "/home/vscode/.rbenv/versions/3.3.4/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/propshaft-0.9.0/lib/propshaft/server.rb:4"
    },
    "route_source_location": "propshaft (0.9.0) lib/propshaft/railtie.rb:42"
  },
  {
    "prefix": "pwa_service_worker",
    "verb": "GET",
    "uri": "/service-worker(.:format)",
    "controller": {
      "name": "rails/pwa",
      "class": "Rails::PwaController",
      "action": "service_worker",
      "source_location": "/workspaces/rails/railties/lib/rails/pwa_controller.rb:8"
    },
    "route_source_location": "/workspaces/rails/tmp/my-test-app/config/routes.rb:9"
  },
  {
    "prefix": "admin_users",
    "verb": "GET",
    "uri": "/admin/users(.:format)",
    "controller": {
      "name": "admin/users",
      "class": "Admin::UsersController",
      "action": "index",
      "source_location": null
    },
    "route_source_location": "/workspaces/rails/tmp/my-test-app/config/routes.rb:13"
  },
  ...
]
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