Rails 7.1 has added rails routes --unused which does the same thing as routes_dont_work. We suggest you use that instead now.

routes_dont_work provides a test to ensure that all the routes in your Rails app actually route to something. In particular, it tests that:

• The referenced controller exists.
• The controller has a public method named the same as the action, or a view exists in the view lookup path for that controller.

A very common case of broken routes is the use of RESTful routes without defining all the actions (index, show, new, create, edit, update, and destroy). If you don't need all of these actions, you can use the only and except options of the resources block.

After routes_dont_work identifies these routes, you should fix or remove them. Be careful if removing, because if, for example, you have a view that generates a link with the broken route, removing the route without removing the reference will make the view raise an exception.

Include routes_dont_work in your Gemfile in the 'test' group.

group :test do
  gem 'routes_dont_work'
end

For rspec, include the 'routes_dont_work' shared example in one of your tests, for example:

require 'spec_helper'
require 'routes_dont_work/rspec'

describe 'routes' do
  include_examples 'routes_dont_work'
end

If this was in routes.rb,

  get 'this_doesnt_exist' => 'fake_controller/fake_action'

your test suite would fail with:

Failures:

  1) routes has no broken routes
     Failure/Error: expect(RoutesDontWork::RouteChecker.get_broken_routes(Rails.application)).to be_empty
       expected `[{:action=>"this_doesnt_exist", :controller=>"fake_controller/fake_action", :path=>"/this_doesnt_exist(.:format)"}].empty?` to return true, got false
     Shared Example Group: "routes_dont_work" called from ./spec/controllers/routes_spec.rb:5
     # ~/routes_dont_work/lib/routes_dont_work/rspec.rb:5:in `block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'

• routes_dont_work will only check the existence of the controller/action/view. It will not guarantee that any request for the routes will succeed.
• Your app may have special dynamic craziness that can confuse routes_dont_work. You should verify that what routes_dont_work says is true.
• routes_dont_work currently only works with rspec. Feel free to contribute changes to support other frameworks.