rails: displaying a user friendly message for a routing error in rails

Question

hello, i am working in rails 2.3 on mac osx leopard. every time i type a url that does not exist in a rails application i get the following error

Routing Error

No route matches "/whatever_i_typed" with {:method=>:get}

this is find for development, but i was wondering how i can make sure users see a friendlier 'oops! not found' page. i was thinking about doing a begin...rescue block but i didn't know where to put it, not did i know the error code (i.e ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound)

thanks! yuval

Answer 1

How about

map.connect '*url', :controller => "not_found"

as a last routes.rb entry? I think it should do the trick, shouldn't it?

Answer 2

This error will never appear in production. Instead, users will see the public/404.html page.

To try this out on your localhost, put passenger/mongrel into production mode. Override the local_request? method on your ApplicationController like so:

class ApplicationController
  def local_request?
    false
  end
end

If you'd like to experiment with dynamic behavior you can check out the rescue_from class method on ActionController.