You’ve created your amazing Ruby on Rails application. And now, you want to get rid of that standard “Welcome to RoR!” front page. How do you do it?
Look in /public. There’s a file called index.html. Delete it, and replace it with your own static front page.
But what if you want a dynamic front page? One that does things like list links to different objects?
Well, you can always create a new model called FrontPage, and map the index page to one of the views. This way, you can include code in your front page.
Here’s how to do that:
New in Rails 2.0: You can specify the map.root directive, with a controller and an optional action, like so:
map.root :controller => :something, :action => :some_action
… and Rails will map the root URL to that action! Or, for Rails 1.2 users:
map.connect '', :controller => :something, :action => :some_action
You’ll also need to:
- Delete /public/index.html
- Modify the controller so that it has the action you specified
- Create a new file in your view for your action
(You can also create a new controller just for the front page, if you like, and use that.)
And that’s it! Anytime you go to http://www.yourdomain.com/, it will route the user to the specified view of the specified controller. If you want to add code (eg. list some objects), just throw the code into the front page controller file.
