Rails routes - show action as root

Question

I'm looking to make a show action of one of my controllers the root. I can easily do this:

map.root :controller => 'articles', :action => 'index'

When I go to localhost:3000/ it lists all the articles - that's great! What I want to achieve, though, is a URL like this

localhost:3000/1

To display an article with the id 1. Changing the route the the following would be what I'd think I have to do:

map.root :controller => 'articles', :action => 'show'

But it does not seem to work. Instead - it looks for a controller called 1 - which does not exist.

How would I go about doing this?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Try this in routes.rb

map.connect ':id', :controller => 'articles', :action => 'show'

You'll want to make sure this is a low priority route because of how general it is. I.e., put it toward the bottom of your routes.rb file but above this section (if you haven't deleted it already):

# low-priorty article show route
map.connect ':id', :controller => 'articles', :action => 'show'

# Install the default routes as the lowest priority.
# Note: These default routes make all actions in every controller accessible via GET requests. You should
# consider removing or commenting them out if you're using named routes and resources.
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'

Answer 2

A root route define only one route. Not several. You can define another route

map.connect '/:id', :controller => 'articles', :action => 'show'

If you want this style of route, maybe a resources (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Resources.html#M000522) is great for you.