Separating Rails Routes

Routes can quickly get out of hand in large apps. In a reverted commit to rails 4, a feature was removed to fix this, citing concerns about separate files becoming less clear. I agree that going buck wild creating new files probably won't help make things simpler, but if your app is big enough, it may become difficult to find, edit, or add new routes in the right places.

Things we need

Routes must load in the correct order
Routes must auto-reload in the dev environment

Here's how dhh and the folks at GitLab get it done:

# config/initializers/routing_draw.rb

# Adds draw method into Rails routing
# It allows us to keep routing splitted into files
class ActionDispatch::Routing::Mapper
  def draw(routes_name)
    instance_eval(File.read(Rails.root.join("config/routes/#{routes_name}.rb")))
  end
end

New `routes.rb`

# config/routes.rb
MyApp::Application.routes.draw do
  draw :api_v1
  draw :api_v2
  draw :admin
end

New route files

# config/routes/api_v1.rb
namespace :api_v1 do
  # lots of routes
end

# config/routes/api_v2.rb
namespace :api_v2 do
  # lots of routes
end

# config/routes/admin.rb
namespace :admin do
  # lots of routes
end

Confirming All Routes Are Intact

To be sure you haven't completely destroyed any endpoints on your app, check your new routes into a branch and run the following:

git checkout master
rake routes | cat > routes_before.txt

git checkout route_split
rake routes | cat > routes_after.txt

diff -u routes_before.txt routes_after.txt
#=> No results means no changes!

Things we need

New routes.rb

New route files

Confirming All Routes Are Intact

end

New `routes.rb`