Creating a rails route to an external URL

Question

A lot of my users keep going to http://(rails app URL)/blog, but I don\'t actually have a blog. I finally setup a Posterous blog and now want to direct my users

Answer 1

Emulate frontend routes as regular Rails controller routes

Background : at the beginning there was Rails monolith rendering html view. Then came a frontend React app, and the need to convert the backend to a JSON api, and generate URLs (mostly in emails) pointing to a frontend app that behaves almost exactly like a Rails controller.

I was looking for a way to mimick the rails resource way to construct URL but to point instead to a frontend URL and generate appropriate path_helpers, that could be used easily with my app, RSpec, cucumber/Capybara, and everything else. I found this hack around routes to emulate frontend routes, which also requires an extra param to be passed to completely desambiguate frontend VS backend routes (useful in capybara testing)

frontend_scope = {
  as: :frontend,
  host: Rails.configuration.frontend_host, # like https://www.example.com
  port: Rails.configuration.frontend_port, # 443
  constraints: (lambda { |request| request.params[:app] == :frontend })
}
scope(frontend_scope) do
  root to: 'static_pages_controller#home'
  resources :articles, only: [:show, :index]
end

Then in my Ruby code I can use

frontend_article_url(@article, app: :frontend)
frontend_articles_url(app: :frontend)
... (and everything that can be generated in a classic rails app)

The inconvenient is that there will be a app parameter in your redirection, that you would have to ignore on your frontend app + all other web apps like Google Analytics, Search engine, etc*.

* the problem being, if you have both a /articles on your frontend and a /articles on your backend, your app will not be able to make the difference with both routes that resolve to the same URL without the help from an extra param