How to remove a URL's trailing slash in a Rails app? (in a SEO view)

Question

In order to avoid content duplication, I would like to avoid the pages of my site being accessible by several URLs (with or without trailing slash).

Currently, the URLs

catalog/product/1

and

catalog/product/1/

lead to the same page. My goal is that the second URL redirect to the first (redirection 301, of course). None page of my site should be accessible with a trailing slash, except my home page / obviously.

What is the best way to do this? Using .htaccess or routes.rb? How would you do that?

NB: I'm developing with Ruby on Rails 1.2.3

score 16 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 25 '10 at 21:10

16

You could use http://github.com/jtrupiano/rack-rewrite for url rewriting to be independent from differences in web-servers.

Example usage in rails application:

config.gem 'rack-rewrite', '~> 1.0.0'
require 'rack/rewrite'
config.middleware.insert_before(Rack::Lock, Rack::Rewrite) do
  r301 %r{(.+)/$}, '$1'
end

answered Aug 25 '10 at 21:10

lest

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6

In Rails 4, you'll need to replace `Rack::Lock` with `Rack::Runtime` (or another), as `Rack::Lock` is not present in the multi-threaded Rails environment enabled by default in Rails 4. – William Denniss Jun 16 '13 at 10:04
This doesn't remove trailing `/` when there is a query parameters. – Amit Patel Oct 07 '20 at 13:13

Sarah Mei · Accepted Answer · 2009-03-09T18:14:53.793

9

I'd use Apache's mod_rewrite. Try this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ $1 [R=301,L]

EDIT: Added R=301. I'm guessing there is an SEO advantage to that vs. the default 302.

edited Mar 09 '09 at 18:14

answered Mar 09 '09 at 16:50

Sarah Mei

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Thanks for the answer. I just tested it and observed a strange behaviour : it rewrites the URL adding the absolute path of the page! For instance, if I try to access to http://www.mysite.com/test/, it redirects to http://www.mysite.com/home/mysite/public_html/test !! Do you understand that? – Flackou Mar 10 '09 at 23:11
1

Hmm, you might need to add "RewriteBase /" before the RewriteRule line. – Sarah Mei Mar 11 '09 at 00:23

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 25 '10 at 19:14

2

You can do this using the rack-rewrite gem. Here's how: http://nanceskitchen.com/2010/05/19/seo-heroku-ruby-on-rails-and-removing-those-darn-trailing-slashes/

answered Aug 25 '10 at 19:14

DougB

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14

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 09 '09 at 17:08

You can't get a redirect using routes.rb. I suppose you could build a controller that just issues redirects and point all URLs ending in '/' to it, but that seems needlessly complicated. Instead, I'd use mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ $1 [R=301,L]

How to remove a URL's trailing slash in a Rails app? (in a SEO view)

4 Answers4

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