the_root_route.md

The Root Route

Currently when we go to the home page of our application, we see the default Ruby on Rails welcome page like the one below.

When we want to navigate to our todo index page, we have to add /todo/index to the end of the URL. But Rails gives us a tool to set any page in our app to the home page. This page is called the root.

Let's make the /todo/index page the root of our application.

First, navigate to your routes.rb file. It should look similar to the code below.

routes.rb file

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get 'todo/index', to: 'todo#index'
  get 'todo/new', to: 'todo#new'
  get 'todo/create', to: 'todo#create'
  get 'todo/edit/:id', to: 'todo#edit'
  get 'todo/update/:id', to: 'todo#update'
  get 'todo/destroy/:id', to: 'todo#destroy'
  get 'todo/show/:id', to: 'todo#show'
end

Currently, when we add 'todo/index' to the end of our URL we are taken to our list of todos. Instead, we want to see our list of todos on the home page of our application. To define our todo index page as our root route, we can replace get 'todo/index', to: 'todo#index' with the following code:

root to: 'todo#index'

As you can see above, when defining the root route, we don't define the part that we add to the end of the URL. This is because the root route is always represented by a forward slash /.

Update HTML href's that use a relative path

An absolute file path is the full URL to a file, e.g.

<img src="https://www.w3schools.com/images/picture.jpg" alt="Mountain">

If your index.html.erb file has an href like this to link to the Show page, then the href is not an absolute path but a relative path, meaning relative to the current folder, which was /todo when our web site url ended in /todo/index.

<a href="show/<%= todo.id %>"><%= todo.description %></a>

But current folder is now the root, i.e. /, due to our above change. So you'll need to change href like so:

<a href="/todo/show/<%= todo.id %>"><%= todo.description %></a>

The final step is to go through the various files in your app and change todo/index to /.

Commit and Push to GitHub

It's important to constantly commit and push your code to GitHub. This way, as you make changes and add to your code, you'll be able to save your progress and not be at risk of losing your work.

Use the following commands to commit your changes and push them to GitHub.

git add -A

git commit -m "Add root route"

git push

Now check your repository on GitHub to see if the changes were successfully pushed.