How do you get a Rails project to start with index.html.erb instead of index.html?

Question

My index.html page for my project needs some Ruby code so I need to change it to a .erb extension. How do I configure Rails to identify the index.html.erb file as the starting page of the project instead of the index.html file?

Answer 1

You need to configure the map.root path in your config/routes.rb file.

map.root :controller => "blogs"

# This would recognize http://www.example.com/ as
params = { :controller => 'blogs', :action => 'index' }

# and provide these named routes
root_url   # => 'http://www.example.com/'
root_path  # => ''

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Routing.html

Answer 2

public/index.html is a flat file, and doesn't go through any templating (everything in /public/ is like this.)

If you want templating on your index page, you need to run the request through a controller and a view. You can map the root URL of your application to a controller with map.root:

map.root :controller => 'home'