Slugify

Slugify is a Rails plugin that automatically converts an attribute into a pretty URL slug and assigns it to another attribute. Conversion happens in a before_validation filter or by manually calling the #slugify or #slugify! instance methods.

Internally, it uses ActiveSupport's #parameterize method and is multi-byte safe.

Usage

By default, slugify generates the slug from the :title attribute and assigns it to the :slug attribute:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  slugify
end

@page = Page.new :title => "Yay Hooray"
@page.slugify
@page.slug        # -> "yay-hooray"

Both fields can be overridden:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  slugify :name, :to => :permalink
end

@user = User.new :name => "Fox Mulder"
@user.slugify
@user.permalink   # -> "fox-mulder"

Slugify will only assign a slug if the :to attribute is blank. This is to prevent all the URLs from breaking every time the user changes a title. Continuing from the example above:

@user.name = "Dana Scully"
@user.slugify
@user.permalink   # -> "fox-mulder"

To override, use the #slugify! instance method:

@user.name = "Dana Scully"
@user.slugify!
@user.permalink   # -> "dana-scully"

or set the option in the DSL:

class Product < ActiveRecord::Base
  slugify :title, :to => :permalink, :force => true
end

Slugify will automatically validate for presence, format, and uniqueness. It's easy to scope the uniqueness constraint:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  slugify :title, :scope => :section_id
end

or turn the constrain off:

class BlogPost < ActiveRecord::Base
  slugify :title, :unique => false
end

Include the ID

To include the id in the slug, do it in the #to_param method:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  slugify

  def to_param
    "#{id}-#{slug}"
  end
end

Bonus! If you include the id first, you can pass the whole slug into #find and it'll Just Work™:

Book.create(:title => "The Stand")
@book = Book.find("1-the-stand")
@book.title     # -> "The Stand"

License

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE 
                    Version 2, December 2004 

 Copyright (C) 2010 Chris Jones
 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified 
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long 
 as the name is changed. 

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE 
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.