One common task that Rails developers use day to day is rake routes (or rails routes in Rails 5). As your app grows, you’ll use grep to only show the routes you’re interested in:

➜  rake routes | grep user
   users POST /users(.:format)     users#create
	 new_user GET  /users/new(.:format) users#new
	     root GET  /                    users#new

As of Rails 4 theres another handy way to search for routes. Simply start your rails server and navigate to localhost:3000/rails/info/routes.

I’ve discovered a third useful way to find this information.

If you’re running a rails console you can access your route helpers through the app object.

2.3.1 :001 > app.new_user_path
 => "/users/new"

You can use Enumerable#grep to search the app’s methods for these helpers.

2.3.1 :002 > app.methods.grep(/path/)
 => [:root_path, :rails_info_properties_path, :rails_info_routes_path, :rails_info_path, :rails_mailers_path, :users_path, :new_user_path, :path, :polymorphic_path, :edit_polymorphic_path, :new_polymorphic_path]

This contains some additional useful info that you don’t get in rails routes - like the paths for rails/info/routes and rails/info/properties/. If also contains some not so useful info like the additional methods :path and :new_polymorphic_path.

We can reduce these down even further using a second grep:

2.3.1 :025 > app.methods.grep(/path/).grep(/user/)
 => [:users_path, :new_user_path]

Greping through methods can be a great way to find new methods on objects that you aren’t familiar with. This is a great illustration of Ruby optimising for programmer happiness.