API's with Rails

I was trying to build an API from memory and I couldn’t remember how to do namespacing. I found this older article building-awesome-rails-apis The main takeaways are these.

namespace :api do
  namespace :v1 do
    resources :people
      # can also do nested resources
  end
end

I did remember to create a new directory in controllers app/controllers/api/v1 and created a new copy of the controller in the new directory but I forgot to update the classname.

before:

class CharactersController < ApplicationController
  ...
end

after:

class API::V1::CharactersController < ApplicationController
  ...
end

Also I also learned about Rails inflections so by adding the following in config/initializers/inflections.rb

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
  inflect.acronym 'API'
end

I can use API::V1 rather than Api::V1

NOTES The article mentioned to serve your api in a subdomain, but I did not do that in this example. I need to read more into that subject. In addition, the article also mentions to serve JSON, but I am unsure if this is because the original example is full rails app and my test app is an rails API only app.

example given:

def index
  @people = Person.all
  respond_to do |format|
    format.json { render :json => @people }
  end
end

my app

def index
  @characters = Character.all

  render json: @characters
end