Question

I’ve got an app where the links work fine when I’m on the homepage, but when I’m on a page belonging to a resource such as “users”, some links get a little weird.

When I’m on the homepage and I click the link for the “About” page, I’m taken there directly. But if I’m on the page for users/index and I hover over the link for the “About” page, it shows the destination as being “users/about.”

Here’s what my routes file looks like.

RobotimusApp::Application.routes.draw do

  resources :users

  root to: "pages#home"

  match '/about', to:'pages#about'
  match '/guides', to:'pages#guides'

end

Here’s what my nav bar looks like

%ul.nav
  %li
    =link_to 'Home', root_url
  %li
    =link_to 'About', 'about'
  - if user_signed_in?
    %li
      = link_to('My Sites', user_path(current_user))

Answer 1

Welp, the issue lies in this line:

=link_to 'About', 'about'

Instead of passing in a routed path like about_path, we pass in the string 'about'. When link_to receives a string as its URL parameter, it doesn’t run it through the router or anything; it assumes that that’s the URL you want to go to. (After all, about_path and the like return strings.)

So, you end up with something like this in the HTML:

<a href="about">About</a>

Here, about is a relative URL, so from the path /users it will go to /users/about.

You could just use a preceding slash to make it an absolute path:

= link_to 'About', '/about'

But it’s not particularly Rails-y to hard-code our URLs when we can use routes instead. You’re probably going for something like this:

= link_to 'About', about_pages_path

(Is about_pages the route name? It probably should be. You can always name it with an as parameter.)