FriendlyId is the “Swiss Army bulldozer” of slugging and permalink plugins for Ruby on Rails. It allows you to create pretty URL’s and work with human-friendly strings as if they were numeric ids for ActiveRecord models.
Using FriendlyId, it’s easy to make your application use URL’s like:
http://example.com/states/washington
instead of:
http://example.com/states/4323454
Want to find out more? Read on. The most recent version of the FriendlyId RDocs can always be found on Rubyforge.
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Text-based id’s look better
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They make URL’s easier to remember.
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They give no hint about the number of records in your database.
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They are better for search engine optimization.
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They can change, breaking your URL’s and your SEO.
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It can be tricky to ensure they’re always unique.
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They can become a pain to manage in large Rails applications.
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They can conflict with your application’s namespace.
FriendlyId tries to offer you the all the advantages, and avoid or soften the potential impact of the disadvantages.
Usually users have unique user names stored in a column with a unique constraint or index. In this case, all you need to do is add this to your model:
has_friendly_id :login
and you can then write code like this:
@member = Member.find("joe") # the old Member.find(1) still works, too. @member.to_param # returns "joe" redirect_to @member # The URL would be /members/joe
Blog posts generally have titles which are distinctive but not necessarily unique. In this and similar cases, FriendlyId provides a Slug model separate from your Post model. The Slug model handles duplicate friendly_ids, as well as versioning.
Your model code would look something like this:
has_friendly_id :title, :use_slug => true
and you can then write code like this:
@post = Post.find("new-version-released") # Post.find(1) still works, too @post.to_param # returns "new-version-released" redirect_to @post # The URL would be /posts/new-version-released
Now in your controllers, if you want to prevent people from accessing your models by numeric id, you can detect whether they were found by the friendly_id:
@post = Post.find(params[:id]) raise "some error" if !@post.found_using_friendly_id?
or, you can 301 redirect if the model was found by the numeric id if you don’t care about numeric access, but want the SEO value of the friendly_id:
@post = Post.find(params[:id]) redirect_to @post, :status => 301 if @post.has_better_id?
The “has_better_id?” method returns true if the model was found with the numeric id, or with an outdated slug.
FriendlyId will record changes to slugs so that you can tell when the model is found with an older slug, or by the numeric id. This can be useful if you want to do a 301 redirect to your updated URL.
class PostsController < ApplicationController before_filter ensure_current_post_url, :only => :show ... def ensure_current_post_url redirect_to @post, :status => :moved_permanently if @post.has_better_id? end end
This is particularly useful when implementing FrindlyId on an existing website that already has many URL’s with the old numeric id listed on search engines. When the search engine spiders crawl your site, they will eventually pick up the new, more SEO-friendly URL’s.
FriendlyId will append a arbitrary number to the end of the id to keep it unique if necessary:
/posts/new-version-released /posts/new-version-released--2 /posts/new-version-released--3 ... etc.
Note that the number is preceeded by two dashes to distinguish it from the rest of the slug. This is important to enable having slugs like:
/cars/peugeot-206 /cars/peugeot-206--2
You can mark off some strings as reserved so that, for example, you don’t end up with this problem:
/users/joe-schmoe # A user chose "joe schmoe" as his user name - no worries. /users/new # A user chose "new" as his user name, and now no one can sign up.
Here’s how to do it:
class Restaurant < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :city has_friendly_id :name, :use_slug => true, :reserved => ["my", "values"] end
As of FriendlyId version 2.0.2, “new” and “index” are reseved by default. When you attempt to store a reserved value, FriendlyId raises a FriendlyId::SlugGenerationError.
FriendlyId can generate unique slugs within a given scope. For example:
class Restaurant < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :city has_friendly_id :name, :use_slug => true, :scope => :city_id end class City < ActiveRecord::Base has_many :restaurants has_friendly_id :name, :use_slug => true end http://example.org/cities/seattle/restaurants/joes-diner http://example.org/cities/chicago/restaurants/joes-diner seattle = City.find('seattle') chicago = City.find('chicago') seattle.restaurants.find("joes-diner") # returns 1 record chicago.restaurants.find("joes-diner") # returns 1 record Restaurant.find("joes-diner") # returns both records
The value for the :scope key in your model follows the same rules as the :scope option in validates_uniqueness_of
macro. That is, it can be some database column of the model, or even array of columns.
This feature is new in FriendlyId 2 and should be considered of experimental quality. Please don’t use this for code that needs to run on the Space Shuttle.
FriendlyId’s slugging can strip diacritics from Western European characters, so that you can have ASCII-only URL’s; for example, conveting “ñøîéçü” to “noiecu.”
has_friendly_id :title, :use_slug => true, :strip_diacritics => true
If you are not using slugs, you’ll have to do this manually for whatever value you’re using as the friendly_id.
FriendlyId can also normalize slug text while preserving accented characters, if you prefer to leave them in your URL’s:
has_friendly_id :title, :use_slug => true ... @post = Post.create(:title => "¡Feliz Año!") @post.friendly_id # "feliz-año"
FriendlyId can generate slugs in any language that can be written with Unicode. It does its best to strip away punctuation regardless of the language being used. Since the authors only speak English, Spanish, Portuguese and German, this has not been extensively tested with anything like Chinese, Russian, Greek, etc, but it “should work.” If you’re a speaker of a language that uses a non-Roman writing system, your feedback would be most welcome.
has_friendly_id :title, :use_slug => true ... @post = Post.create(:title => "友好编号在中国") @post.friendly_id # "友好编号在中国" @post2 = Post.create(:title => "友好编号在中国") @post2.friendly_id # "友好编号在中国--2"
While FriendlyId’s slug generation options work for most people, you may need something else. As of version 2.0.4 you can pass in your own custom slug generation block:
require 'stringex' class Post < ActiveRecord::Base has_friendly_id :title, :use_slug => true do |text| # User stringex to generate the friendly_id rather than the baked-in methods text.to_url end end ... @post = Post.create(:title => "tell your readers 你好") @post.friendly_id # "tell-your-readers-ni-hao"
FriendlyId will still respect your settings for max length and reserved words, but will use your block rather than the baked-in methods to normalize the friendly_id text.
(As an aside, the stringex library provides some very cool slugging functionality and is a great option for apps using FriendlyId in either English or Chinese. Definitely check it out.)
FriendlyId is installed as a Ruby Gem:
gem install friendly_id
Alternatively, you can install it as a Rails plugin, though this is discouraged:
./script/plugin install git://github.com/norman/friendly_id.git
If you are installing as a plugin, make sure you have installed the unicode gem, which FriendlyId depends on:
gem install unicode
FriendlyId currently works with Rails 2.0.0 - 2.3.0. Here’s how to set it up.
1) Install the Gem:
sudo gem install friendly_id cd my_app script/generate friendly_id rake db:migrate
2) Load FriendlyId in your app:
# Rails 2.1 and higher; add this to the gem section of environment.rb: config.gem "friendly_id" # Rails 2.0; this goes at the bottom of environment.rb require 'friendly_id'
3) Add some code to your models:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base has_friendly_id :title, :use_slug => true end
4) If you are using slugs, you can use a Rake task to generate slugs for your existing records:
friendly_id:make_slugs MODEL=MyModelName
If you eventually want to expire old slugs every so often, or perhaps every day via cron, you can do:
rake:friendly_id:remove_old_slugs
The default is to remove dead slugs older than 45 days, but is configurable:
rake:friendly_id:remove_old_slugs MODEL=MyModelName DAYS=60
If you installed an older version of FriendlyId and want to upgrade to 2.0.x, follow these steps:
sudo gem install friendly_id
config.gem "friendly_id"
Add this to the bottom of environment.rb:
require 'friendly_id'
git rm -rf vendor/plugins/friendly_id svn delete vendor/plugins/friendly_id # or whatever
./script generate friendly_id_20_upgrade rake db:migrate
FriendlyId is hosted on Github, and we love pull requests. :-)
Please report them on Lighthouse.
FriendlyId was created by Norman Clarke, Adrian Mugnolo, and Emilio Tagua.
Copyright © 2008 Norman Clarke, Adrian Mugnolo and Emilio Tagua, released under the MIT license.