Learning Rails

Setting a Default Page

Before moving on to more “serious” concerns about developing applications, there’s one question that web developers always seem to ask about 15 minutes into their first Rails experience:

How do I set a default page for the application?

The Rails welcome page, shown in Figures 1-3 and 1-10, is just plain ugly. There are two ways to change that:

• Edit the public/index.html file and put in something more to your liking

• Delete the public/index.html file and tweak the config/routes.rb file

The first one is pretty easy, but it doesn’t integrate very tightly with your Rails application. The second approach lets you pick a controller that will run if the Rails application is run without specifying a controller—that is, in the test environment, by directly visiting http://localhost:3000/.

To make this work, you’ll need to enter an extra line in the config/routes.rb file. Near the bottom of that, you’ll see:

# You can have the root of your site routed with map.root --
# just remember to delete public/index.html.
# map.root :controller => "welcome"

Change the last line of that to:

map.root  :controller => "hello", :action => "index"

Save the file, make sure you’ve deleted or renamed the public/index.html file, and restart your server. You should see something like Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6. Accessing a controller by default, when the URL doesn’t specify one

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