Github中的友好URL

Question

How has Github managed to get friendly URLs for representing repos of users? For a project called abc by username foo , how do they work around with a URL like: http://github.com/foo/abc . Are they fetching the abc model for the DB from the title in the URL (which sounds unreasonable as they are modifying the titles). How are they transferring the unique ID of the abc repo which they can fetch and show in the view?

The reason I ask is that I am facing a similar problem of creating friendlier URLs to view a resource. MongoDB's object IDs are quite long and make the URL look horrific. Is there a workaround? All the tutorials that demonstrate CRUD (or REST) URLs for a resource always include the object's unique ID(eg http://mysite.org/post/1 or http://mysite.org/post/1/edit . Is there a better way to do it?

Answer 1

Not having seen their code, I couldn't tell you exactly how they do it, but if you're using Rails there are at least two Ruby gems that will give you similar results:

Take a look at Slugged and friendly_id

Answer 2

http://github.com/foo/abc is a unique repository identifier (for that repo's master branch). I'd assume that somewhere they have a table that looks like:

repository-id | user-id | project-id

and are just looking up based on user and project rather than repository-id.

You'd need to do some domain-specific mapping between internal and user-friendly ids, but you'd need to make sure that was a 1:1 mapping.

Answer 3

See this rails cast on methods, gems and solutions to common problems you might get while modifying the application to use friendly urls.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/314-pretty-urls-with-friendlyid?view=asciicast

(although Ryan Bates deserves the rep+ for this)

Answer 4

I mocked a structure like this using FriendlyID and Nested Resources .

Essentially, use friendly ID to get the to_param -ish slugs in your routes, then set up nested resources. Using GitHub as an example:

routes.rb

resources :users do
  resources :repositories
end

Then in your controller, say, for repositories, you can check the existence of params[:user_id] and use that to determine the user from the route. The reason I check for existence is because I did something like (roughly):

/myrepositories/:repository_id
/:user_id/:repository_id

So my controller does:

def show
  @user = params[:user_id] ? User.find(params[:user_id]) : current_user
end

I followed this tutorial here to get started with this same project.

Answer 5

This is called URL rewriting if the web server does it (such as Apache), and routing when it happens in a web application framework (such as Ruby on Rails).

http://www.sinatrarb.com/intro#Routes
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html