Urls for Humans

Urls for Humans is a gem that allows you to apply meaningful names to your Rails Application's urls by leveraging what happens under the covers with Model.find(params[:id]), to_i, and to_param. This makes it easy to turn users/1 to users/1-john-otander. So long as the url is prefixed with the model's id (which Urls for Humans ensures), the lookup will happen exactly how we intend it to with a few key benefits:

• Simple thanks to ActiveSupport.
• Lightweight, weighing in at roughly 20 something lines of added gem code to your Rails app (since ActiveSupport is already a dependency).
• Persistent urls because changes in the latter portions of a param won't affect it's lookup.
• There are no slugs required.

Why use Urls for Humans in place of Friendly ID?

This is a different approach to friendly URLs than the friendly_id gem because it doesn't modify the db queries themselves. The urls_for_humans approach essentially allows all urls fitting the form resource/<id>-<anything else> to route to resource/:id because to_i is called on the id parameter.

Personally, I prefer this approach because a link out there in the wild to a user's profile users/previous_username isn't broken (404'd) when they change their username to users/new_username because the slug has been changed.

Also, I'm biased.

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
  include 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.

I don't like it when you leverage executable class bodies

That's fine. You can add a method to your model, instead.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  include UrlsForHumans

  # ...

  def humanly_attrs
    [:first_name, :last_name, :favorite_food]
  end

  # ...
end

This will result in "#{ id }-#{ first_name }-#{ last_name }-#{ favorite_food }". Yay.

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

Crafted with <3 by John Otander (@4lpine).