Urls For Humans

Urls For Humans allows you to apply meaningful names to your Rails Application's urls by leveraging what happens under the covers with Model.find(params[:id]) and to_param. So long as the url is prefixed with the model's id, the lookup will happen exactly how we intend it to with a few key benefits:

• Simplicity
• Lightweight
• Persistent urls because changes the the latter portions of a param won't affect it's lookup.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'urls_for_humans'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install urls_for_humans

Usage

To use Urls For Humans you need to extend the UrlsForHumans module, and call the class method urls_for_humans:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  extend UrlsForHumans

  # ...

  urls_for_humans :first_name, :last_name

  # ...
end

The urls_for_humans method can be a collection of any information that you'd like to include in the url. For example, with the above class we'd result in:

u = User.create(first_name: 'John', last_name: 'Otander')

u.to_param
# => '1-john-otander'

u.first_name = nil
u.to_param
# => '1-otander'

With this solution, an ActiveRecord object will always produce the correct url throughout the application:

link_to user.first_name, user
# => <a href="http://localhost:3000/users/1-john-otander" 

Additionally, any link that hits the internet will persist because 1-random-content, 1-other-random-content, and 1-john-doe will all route to the same resource.

Resources

• https://github.com/norman/friendly_id
• https://gist.github.com/cdmwebs/1209732

Contributing

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/johnotander/urls_for_humans/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request