如何在Rails应用程序和Rails API之间最佳共享路由

Question

I am writing my first "real" Rails app after making a few successful learning projects and I'm still a little bit iffy on best practises for App vs API routes. Ideally, API routes will be RESTful, mainly revolving around using resources :articles or whatever, but I'm wondering which of the the following two scenarios is best

• Create the app itself using RESTful routes, then bolt on an API in the "api" namespace/subdomain for example, and after authentication, piggy back off the same routes (not sure exactly how to do the piggy backing yet with different authentication, but that will come later. Or;
• Create the app itself with whatever routes are semantic and work well (still ideally CRUD based), then create an entirely new set of controllers and routes for the API (RESTful)

I appreciate any feedback that anyone has.

Answer 1

The default "Rails way" is to make your models available to different clients through a single set of URIs, handled by a single set of controllers — /articles for browsers, /articles.json or /articles.xml for programmatic access. You can see that in Rails' emphasis on "resources", the respond_to mechanism in your controllers and so on.

This often works very well for simpler APIs that match the CRUD semantics closely. If yours for whatever reason does not, you might be better off with separating it out.

Try starting out the simple way by sticking to this 'one controller for both' approach. If you like, you could use

scope '(api)' do
  resources :articles
  resources :authors
  resources :comments
  # ...
end

to add an optional '/api/' path segment to your URLs - in this case, giving you both /api/articles and /articles , routed to the same controller. This gives you an easy way out, should you later decide to switch to separate controllers for HTML and API access.