validates_presence_of :purpose

If you have a couchapp and want to have nice URLS, go read this blogpost. If you still don’t get it, here is how to do it. It doesn’t work with my outliner app, because it is so entangled with old couchapp and jquery.couch.js versions and I’m not up to upgrade hell right now. But I’ll write it down for my next project and for you, yay.

Let’s say you have an app running at http://account.couchone.com/mydb/_design/doingnotes/index.html and want to add the additional URL http://account.couchone.com/index.html. First you have to set up a virtual host. (Want to know why? Go back read the blogpost). If you are using a hosted CouchDB instance and don’t have access to the local.ini file, you can also do this remotely:

curl -X PUT http://username:password@account.couchone.com/_config/vhosts/account.couchone.com -d '"/mydb/_design/doingnotes/_rewrite"'

Check at the bottom of http://account.couchone.com/_utils/config.html if there is a key value pair “account.couchone.com” => “/mydb/_design/doingnotes/_rewrite”.

Now it won’t work yet, because you still have to add the rewrite(s) to your design document. Do this by adding a file “rewrites.json” in your project folder. I has to contain an array of json objects with a “from” and a “to” attribute each. They work down in the path starting with the design document (the “doingnotes” in the URL). You can use wildcards. “from” specifies where it should map from, “to” which file it should map to. This is how rewrites.json looks for my application:

[{
  "from": "",
  "to": "index.html"
},
{
  "from": "vendor/*",
  "to": "vendor/*"
},
{
  "from": "app/*",
  "to": "app/*"
},
{
  "from": "config/*",
  "to": "config/*"
},
{
  "from": "_view/*",
  "to": "_view/*"
}]

If you just put the first from/to pair in, you can already call the application, but it won’t work because the code in the design document needs access to all the folders that are stored in the application’s root level (that is not in the “_attachments” folder). The wildcards map everything down from that path. If you have code in other locations as well, you have to add rewrites for those folders too. That’s it.