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Clean your Rails routes: grouping

How to separate & group your routes by logical entities

In Ruby on Rails, all the routes of a given application can be found within the config/routes.rb file.

You add more and more routes in this file as your project grows.

The problem here is that this file potentially becomes very complicated to manage over time.

That’s why finding a way to order and maintain your routes is important.

Let’s look at an example to see how we could achieve this task.

The my-blog application

A few months ago, we created our my-blog application. This application provides a way to create and manipulate blog posts.

Also, it provides an admin dashboard.

So the config/routes.rb looks like as following

Here we can isolate 3 entities:

• The users resource
• The posts resource
• The admin namespace

So let’s see how to extract each of these entities in a separate file.

First, we have to manipulate our config/application.rb file

This line will redefine the target of our config.paths['config/routes.rb'].

The target is now all the Ruby files under the config/routes/ directory.

So when your application receives a request, Rails will search the expected route in the routing table defined under the config/routes directory.

Now, let’s have a look at the files in this directory

$> tree config/routes
config/routes
  ├── base.rb
  ├── admin.rb
  ├── posts.rb
  └── users.rb
0 directories, 4 files

Note that each file uses the Rails.application.routes.draw method to append our resources to the existing routing table.

Finally, you can remove the config/routes.rb file.

Conclusion

With this implementation, As things progress, you’ll be able to maintain your routes in a very easy way.

And that will be a good introduction to your app for new developers.

Voilà!

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