Newbie Question:Have to type localhost/controller/index in browser to get index method to display in Rails. Why?

Question

I am new to Rails and I am reading Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2 but I am using Rails 3.0.0. In the book we had just set up our first controller (StoriesController) and fired up the server and typed in http://localhost:3000/stories and it should have displayed the index.html.erb file but instead when I type in that url I get "Routing Error: No route matches "/stories" but when I type in http://localhost:3000/stories/index it works properly. Can somebody explain to me why rails is not loading the index.html.erb file implicitly when I go to localhost/stories?

Answer 1

Depending on how you created your routes (in config\routes.rb). Unfortunately, if you scaffold a controller, rails now generates a route like this:

get 'posts#index'

If it is a restful-controller, you better write

resources :posts

Or if it is a special controller (with only an index action) you could write

match '/posts' => 'posts#index' 

To provide the fallback match ':controller(/action(/:id(.:format))) is generally avoided. Because it opens up all your controller-methods. The preferred way is that you declare explicitly how to access your site.