Rails: redirect all unknown routes to root_url

Question

Whenever a user hits the wrong page, rails shows 404.html from the public folder. However, I'd like just to redirect the browser to the root page, without showing anything. So I tried globbing, but came to no avail, it still shows the 404 page. Here's an extract from my routes file:

# ...
map.root :controller => 'home', :action => 'home'
map.connect '*', :controller => 'home', :action => 'home'

Any suggestions? Thanks, guys!

Solution 1

If your project is powered by rails 3, add simply this line to your routes.rb

match '*path' => redirect('/')

Edit: If you're on Rails 4 or 5

match '*path' => redirect('/'), via: :get

or

get '*path' => redirect('/')

Solution 2

Like the answer by Arkan. One point, if do not want this behaviour in development environment, then could do -

match '*path' => redirect('/')   unless Rails.env.development?

Solution 3

Rails 4-

(routes.rb)

You can still use a simple get to redirect all unknown routes.

  get '*path', to: 'home#index'

If you wish to provide routing to both POST and GET requests you can still use match, but Rails wants you to specify the request method via via.

  match "*path" => "home#index", via: [:get, :post]  

Remember that routes.rb is executed sequentially (matching the first route that fits the supplied path structure), so put wildcard catching at the bottom of your matchings.

Solution 4

There seems to be a bug in rails 5.2 where active_storage routes are picked up by the catchall route, resulting in broken links to uploaded images. The issue has been reported in the rails repo on github, and someone commented with the below patch until the bug gets fixed in a new release:

In routes.rb right before last end

get '*all', to: 'application#index', constraints: lambda { |req|
    req.path.exclude? 'rails/active_storage'
  }

then in the application controller add:

def index
  flash.notice = 'No page found at that address'
  redirect_to root_path
end

Solution 5

You need create a controller to do that

class RedirectsController 

  def index
    redirect_to root_url
  end
end

And in your routes

map.connect '*', :controller => 'redirects', :action => 'index'

View more solutions

Comments

[Albus Dumbledore]

Thanks! Well, it's Rails 2.3.10

[Albus Dumbledore]

Thanks a lot, man! It did it. That's how I did it in rails 2: map.connect '*path', :controller => 'home', :action => 'home' So, it's the '*path' that was the key to the whole thing. Thanks again :-)

[Sam Wilder]

Is this answer for Rails 3 as well?

[shingara]

Works with rails 3 too. You just need change the ligne with match. See globing in routing guides

[Avisra]

You can also use get instead of match, which is just shorthand for adding via: :get.

[ahnbizcad]

Make sure to put this at the bottom of your routes list.

[ahnbizcad]

Thank you for the notice of putting it at the bottom.

[ahnbizcad]

This doesn't seem to work for valid routes with invalid ids (e.g. root.com/articles/293, where 293 is a non-existent article id in your database)

[Almir Sarajčić]

Well that's because route was matched and that's all that router is concerned about. You need to do additional check in your controller to see if the article with the provided ID exists.

[GameKyuubi]

I'd like to point out that "or" should not be part of the code block in this answer. Should be match '*path' => redirect('/'), via: :get or get '*path' => redirect('/')

[Jeremy Thomas]

Does this still work? Doesn't seem to work in my Rails 4 app.

[tomb]

I have a problem in rails 5 where the get '*path', to: 'searches#new' results in 406 errors for all uploaded images in my app.

[Zoran Majstorovic]

also, you can add catch-all route after application initialization, as described here: github.com/rails/rails/issues/671#issuecomment-1780159

[Sergio Gonzalez]

This answer is the way to go in Rails 6 with ActiveStorage