How do I get twitter/friendfeed like home urls in rails?

Question

I want to be able to have twitter like friendly urls like http://twitter.com/username. How to pull this off in rails?

Answer 1

You can use the friendly_id gem.

Answer 2

Probably the easiest way is to have a catch-all route at the bottom of your routing table. Something like:

map.connect '/:slug', :controller => 'users', :action => 'show'

Then in the users controller....

def show
  @user = User.find_by_username(params[:slug])
end

I would also recommend catching a ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound to show a 404 page. You can put something like this in ApplicationController:

rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, :with => :not_found

then define a method not_found to render an error page or something.