A week and a half ago, I posted 9 Ways to Use Rails Metal. The fourth way I listed was “Redirecting Affiliate Links.” The basic idea is that you can set up http://mydomain.com/hosting to go to the link you were given by the hosting company you have an affiliate account with.

The first thing I did was set up a model to manage affiliate redirects.

script/generate model affiliate_redirect path:string location:string

Then I ran my migrations, to set up the database.

rake db:migrate

Then I set up a Rails Metal instance called affiliate_redirects.

script/generate metal affiliate_redirects

From there, programming Rails Metal was pretty simple. You just have to find an AffiliateRedirect with the path visited and redirect to the AffiliateRedirect’s location. Here’s the code:

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require(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../config/environment") unless defined?(Rails)
 
class AffiliateRedirects
  def self.call(env)
    redirect = AffiliateRedirect.connection.select_all("SELECT * FROM affiliate_redirects WHERE path = '#{env["PATH_INFO"]}'").first
    if redirect && (location = redirect["location"])
      [302, {"Content-Type" => "text/html", "Location" => location}, ["You are being redirected."]]
    else
      [404, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Not Found"]]
    end
  end
end

This is the quick solution to the Rails action with nothing but a redirect_to.

middleware, Rails Metal, redirect, Ruby on Rails, tutorial