Making Requests

Let’s see this in our browser.

First, run bin/rails server in your terminal to start the Rails server. You will see the Rails welcome page in the preview pane.

Go to http://localhost:3000/products, Rails will render the products index HTML.

Our browser requested /products and Rails matched this route to products#index. Rails sent the request to the ProductsController and called the index action. Since this action was empty, Rails rendered the matching template at app/views/products/index.html.erb and returned that to our browser. Pretty cool!

If we open config/routes.rb, we can tell Rails the root route should render the Products index action by adding this line:

root "products#index"

Restart the server (by stopping it vis Ctrl+C and starting again), got to http://localhost:3000, and you will see that Rails will render Products#index at the home screen.