FriendlyId is the "Swiss Army bulldozer" of slugging and permalink plugins for Ruby on Rails. It allows you to create pretty URLs and work with human-friendly strings as if they were numeric ids for Active Record models.

Using FriendlyId, it's easy to make your application use URLs like:

http://example.com/states/washington

instead of:

http://example.com/states/4323454

FriendlyId offers many advanced features, including: slug history and versioning, i18n, Globalize support, scoped slugs, reserved words, and custom slug generators.

FriendlyId is compatible with Active Record 3.0 and higher.

FriendlyId 4.x introduces many changes incompatible with 3.x. If you're upgrading, please read the docs to see what's new.

The current docs can always be found here.

The best place to start is with the Guide, which compiles the top-level RDocs into one outlined document.

You might also want to watch Ryan Bates's Railscast on FriendlyId.

gem install friendly_id

rails new my_app

cd my_app

gem "friendly_id", "~> 4.0.1"

rails generate scaffold user name:string slug:string

# edit db/migrate/*_create_users.rb
add_index :users, :slug, unique: true

rake db:migrate

# edit app/models/user.rb
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  extend FriendlyId
  friendly_id :name, use: :slugged
end

User.create! name: "Joe Schmoe"

rails server

GET http://localhost:3000/users/joe-schmoe

# If you're adding FriendlyId to an existing app and need
# to generate slugs for existing users, do this from the
# console, runner, or add a Rake task:
User.find_each(&:save)

The latest benchmarks for FriendlyId are maintained here.

Please report them on the Github issue tracker for this project.

If you have a bug to report, please include the following information:

• Version information for FriendlyId, Rails and Ruby.
• Full stack trace and error message (if you have them).
• Any snippets of relevant model, view or controller code that shows how you are using FriendlyId.

If you are able to, it helps even more if you can fork FriendlyId on Github, and add a test that reproduces the error you are experiencing.

For more info on how to report bugs, please see this article.

FriendlyId was originally created by Norman Clarke and Adrian Mugnolo, with significant help early in its life by Emilio Tagua. I'm deeply gratful for the generous contributions over the years from many volunteers.

Part of the inspiration to rework FriendlyId came from Darcy Laycock's library Slugged, which he was inspired to create because of frustrations he experienced while using FriendlyId 3.x. Seeing a smart programmer become frustrated with my code was enough of a kick in the butt to make me want to significantly improve this library.

Many thanks to him for providing valid, real criticism while still being a cool about it. I definitely recommend you check out his library if for some reason FriendlyId doesn't do it for you.

Thanks also to Loren Segal and Nick Plante for YARD and the rubydoc.info website which FriendlyId uses for documentation.

Lastly, FriendlyId uses Travis for continuous integration. It's an excellent, free service created by a whole bunch of good people - if you're not already using it, you should be!

Copyright (c) 2008-2012 Norman Clarke and contributors, released under the MIT license.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.