CRUD Routes

There are 4 common actions you will generally need for a resource: Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD). This translates to 8 typical routes:

• Index - Shows all the records
• New - Renders a form for creating a new record
• Create - Processes the new form submission, handling errors and creating the record
• Show - Renders a specific record for viewing
• Edit - Renders a form for updating a specific record
• Update (full) - Handles the edit form submission, handling errors and updating the entire record, and typically triggered by a PUT request.
• Update (partial) - Handles the edit form submission, handling errors and updating specific attributes of the record, and typically triggered by a PATCH request.
• Destroy - Handles deleting a specific record

We can add routes for these CRUD actions with the following:

get "/products", to: "products#index"

get "/products/new", to: "products#new"
post "/products", to: "products#create"

get "/products/:id", to: "products#show"

get "/products/:id/edit", to: "products#edit"
patch "/products/:id", to: "products#update"
put "/products/:id", to: "products#update"

delete "/products/:id", to: "products#destroy"

Resource Routes

Typing out these routes every time is redundant, so Rails provides a shortcut for defining them. To create all of the same CRUD routes, replace the above routes with this single line:

resources :products

Let’s run bin/rails routes -g products one more time to see the list of resourceful routes.