Understanding Routing

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, I wanna talk a little more about routing.
• 00:07 I wanna get a little bit more of an understanding of routes and
• 00:10 what's going on here.
• 00:11 And we also wanna change our app a little bit.
• 00:14 In the last video, we created this web page, and the URL is home/index.
• 00:20 And if we go back to our actual homepage,
• 00:22 we still have this weird welcome aboard screen.
• 00:26 We really don't want that, what we want is this to be our new homepage.
• 00:29 So how do we do that?
• 00:30 Well, it all gets tied into routing.
• 00:33 So right now, this is our routes.rb file, it's in the config directory,
• 00:37 we had this open in the last video.
• 00:39 And this is the index that Rails generated for us when we used the generator.
• 00:44 But we can change that.
• 00:45 What we want is to make this page our root page.
• 00:49 And a root is just, whenever you type in the basic URL of your website,
• 00:55 that's the root URL.
• 00:57 So we need to create a root route, kinda hard to say, but it's pretty easy.
• 01:02 Just come here, and we're gonna do this manually 'cause it's quick and easy.
• 01:05 We type in root, and then it's just like before,
• 01:10 home/index except for this slash,
• 01:13 instead of a slash, it's a number sign or a hashtag.
• 01:18 So if we save this file, come back here and hit reload, boom, there we go.
• 01:23 And now check this out, if we type in home/index,
• 01:27 this page still exists at home/index because this route is still there.
• 01:32 In fact, we can get rid of this.
• 01:34 I'm just gonna type a hashtag to comment that out.
• 01:37 And if we save this and come back, and you see we're at the home/index URL,
• 01:42 hit reload, we get an error because we've removed that route.
• 01:47 Now, the web page still exists, it's right here.
• 01:49 It's still in our views > home directory, but
• 01:54 our app can't find it because we've removed the route.
• 02:00 And like I said, routing can get pretty complicated.
• 02:04 And for the most part, you don't need to learn the complicated routing stuff,
• 02:09 especially not for beginners type things and even intermediate Rails programing.
• 02:13 You're not gonna use routing a whole lot, it's just gonna be basic get and
• 02:18 root routes, like this.
• 02:19 So it's not something you have to overly worry about.
• 02:23 But if you do, I mentioned in the last video, that Rails guide.
• 02:27 I love these Rails guides.
• 02:29 You're gonna spend a lot of time going through these throughout your lives.
• 02:32 And let's see, Rails Routing from the Outside In, here it is.
• 02:35 Just all kinds of stuff you can learn about it.
• 02:37 But the root route, we're well on our way.
• 02:39 Now, here's one more tip, when it comes to routing.
• 02:43 You can figure out what all your routes are currently by going to your routes.rb
• 02:47 file and just looking at it.
• 02:49 But sometimes it's kinda hard to read this file.
• 02:51 Also, I should mention there's some information in the file itself,
• 02:55 different examples.
• 02:56 So kinda look through here, just eyeball this stuff, and
• 02:58 you'll get an idea of different things you can do with routing.
• 03:01 But if you come down to your command line terminal and type in rake routes,
• 03:05 what that does it goes through this routes file and
• 03:08 it creates a list of all the different routes that you have in your app.
• 03:12 Now, right now all we have is this root, and
• 03:14 you can see it goes to this forward slash 'cause it's our root route.
• 03:18 It used to be home/index, now it's just /nothing.
• 03:24 So that's why that little slash guy is there.
• 03:27 But as our app gets more complicated, this will grow.
• 03:30 And sometimes we'll need to know how the routing works, and so
• 03:33 we'll use this rake routes command.
• 03:35 So keep that in mind in the future.

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