The Root Route in Ruby on Rails

When developing a web application, the most important thing is to set what to display on the home page. In Ruby on Rails, we specify what we want to show on the home page by defining a root route.

When the user visits our site, they make a request for our home page. The Rails router forwards this request to a controller action. 

We can specify what controller action to run by defining a root route. In Rails, we define our routes in a file called routes.rb in the config/ folder. 

We put these routes inside the Rails.application.routes.draw do block. Usually, we put the root route at the top, because it is the most accessed route.

We set the root route using the root method. How do we use this method? Let's say we have a controller called pages and an index action inside this controller. We can set the root route to this index action like this:

root to: 'pages#index'

Or we can use the shortcut:

root 'pagex#index'

No need to specify an HTTP method, because in Rails the root route always routes only GET requests.