Routes with names that end in _path

A May Of WTFs
1

Small thing, but this trips newbies up a bit: Rails Routing from the Outside In — Ruby on Rails Guides

I’ve seen lots of routes that look like:

get 'exit', to: 'sessions#destroy', as: :logout_path

And then calls to logout_path in views not working, until someone reminds them that _path and _url get added on to the end of the alias.

Ideas:

  • Have something on the default error screen that calls out this specific mistake.
  • Have a warning in the server logs if a route alias ends with _path.
  • ???
5 Likes
2

I like an idea of a warning in the server logs. I think the route file is parsed fairly early, so we might even be able to manage this at server startup.

3

How about just treating those like if they were defined without this _path suffix.

By that I mean that all those 3 definitions become equivalent aliases of the same route named logout

get 'exit', to: 'sessions#destroy', as: :logout_path
get 'exit', to: 'sessions#destroy', as: :logout_url
get 'exit', to: 'sessions#destroy', as: :logout

With maybe some info/warning message in logs when booting the app.

There is of course possibility that someone left the _path routes names and invokes it later as _path_path or _path_url and it make this possibly breaking change that requires being noted in Changelog but I think it should be rare enough case that changing this behaviour will not wreck too much havoc in general.

1 Like
4

My only concern with the server logs approach is that in my experience newbies never look there (but maybe we should think of a way to address that). I would prefer to handle this with the view code raises - rather than saying “undefined method logout” we could have a more useful nudge right there in the browser. But I’m happy with anything that makes this easier!

1 Like