How do I route user profile URLs to skip the controller?

Question

Right now my user profile URLs are like so:

http://example.com/users/joeschmoe

And that points to the show method in the user controller.

What I'd ideally like to do is offer user profile URLs like this:

http://example.com/joeschmoe

So, what sort of route and controller magic needs to happen to pull that off?

Answer 1

In routes.rb this should do the trick:

map.connect ":login", :controller => 'users', :action => 'show'

Where login is the name of the variable passed to the show method. Be sure to put it after all other controller mappings.

Answer 2

This does not make sense unless you have no controllers. What happens when you want to name a controller the same as an existing user? What if a user creates a username the same as one of your controllers? This looks like a terrible idea. If you think the /user/ is too long try making a new custom route for /u/

So your custom route would be...

map.connect 'u/:id', :controller => 'my/usercontroller', :action => 'someaction'

Answer 3

Well, one thing you need is to ensure that you don't have name collisions with your users and controllers.

Once you do that you, can add a route like this:

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

Another thing people have done is to use subdomains and rewrite rules in the web server, so you can have http://joeshmoe.example.com

Answer 4

I disagree with what jcm says about this. It's not a terrible idea at all and is used in production by the two biggest social networks Facebook and MySpace.

The route to match http://example.com/username would look like this:

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

If you want to go the subdomain route and map profiles to a URL like http://username.example.com/, I recommend using the SubdomainFu plugin and the resulting route would look like:

map.root :controller => 'users', :action => 'show' , :conditions => {:subdomain => /.+/}

These broad, catch all routes should be defined last in routes.rb, so that they are of lowest priority, and more specific routes will match first.

I also recommend using a validation in your User model to eliminate the possibility of a user choosing a username that will collide with current and future routes:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_exclusion_of :username, :in => %w( messages posts blog forum admin profile )
  …
end