Question

I’m writing a Rails 3.2 app with backbone, and since I only need rails to render one page, I have no need for a controller to back the index page.

Is there a way to render the layout (application.html.erb) without a controller? I imagine it would be a configuration in the routes.rb file?

My first thought was to move it to index.html in the /public directory, but I need to take advantage of erb for javascript includes and CSRF helpers, etc.

Answer 1

I get that you don’t need the controller to do anything, but Rails is “opinionated” software; it expects a controller and a view, because that is the way it was designed, and trying to work around that is going to give you a lot of trouble.

Just

1. create an empty controller class in /app/controllers/main_controller.rb
2. create an empty view file /app/views/main/index.html.erb
3. set up a route like :root => 'main#index'

Easy peasy.