Question

I’ve got a site with profiles where the slug can be changed by the user. I would like to implement automatic rewriting of these slug changes. Either in Ruby or Nginx, is there any libraries or guides on how to do this?

There’s these https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/URL_Rewriting but at what layer would this best be implemented?

What’s your experiences and best practices?

Answer 1

I don’t know if there is a library around. But would I would do is:

• Save the former slugs of a user, p.e. using paper trail
• When finding the user by slug considering the former versions as well
• Redirect on application level to the most recent slug (user.slug)

If you follow that approach it assumes that a slug already used by a user in the past cannot be reused.

Hope that helps.