I need to redirect those terrible trailing URL slashes on a large project with thousands of articles. Turns out that trailing slash == duplicate content.
The first suggestion is usually to use Apache’s mod_rewrite, however I wanted a server-agnostic way to handle these redirects. Not every project these days is sitting on top of Apache. And in my particular case, I need this to work on Heroku’s very tightly controlled configuration stack.
The solution which worked for me is just including and configuring the rack-rewrite gem.
1. Add rack-rewrite to your Gemfile
gem 'rack-rewrite'
Then rerun bundle install from your shell to make it available to your project.
2. Configure
Rails 4
In config/application.rb:
require "rack/rewrite"
...
# Rewrite trailing slashes
# goes inside your main Application class
config.middleware.insert_before(Rack::Runtime, Rack::Rewrite) do
r301 %r{^/(.\*)/$}, '/$1'
end