Rails Routes

A route in Rails refers to a line of code that pairs an HTTP Method and a URL path. The route also tells Rails which controller and action should respond to a request.

To define a route in Rails, go to the code editor and add the following route to config/routes.rb

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get "/products", to: "products#index"

  # Defines the root path route ("/")
  # root "posts#index"
end

This route tells Rails to look for GET requests to the /products path. In this example, we specified "products#index" for where to route the request.

You can verify that by running a special Rails command that displays all the routes your application responds to. In the terminal, run the following:

$ bin/rails routes

The output contains routes for the built-in Rails features like health checks, so it could be tricky to spot the route we’ve just added. You can use the -g option to grep the matching routes:

$ bin/rails routes -g products

Now, let’s talk a bit on how Rails routing works.