New site design, might as well use it to announce a new tool I’ve written. Namekuji is a slug generator for any Ruby ORM that builds on Rails’ ActiveModel, including Neo4j.rb and Mongoid, born from my ongoing Pokémon website project’s need for a slug generator that, unlike FriendlyId, isn’t dependent on ActiveRecord.

If you have a model—say, for blog posts—with title and slug columns, all it takes to get generation and validation of the slug is an include and a call to sluggable:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Namekuji

  sluggable on_field: :title
end

Before validation of a Post object occurs, Namekuji will generate a slug from the object’s title and insert it into slug, and it’ll validate the uniqueness and format of the slug to make sure everything is kosher before the object is saved. The resulting Post will also have a to_param method that returns the slug, for convenient use in URLs. The slug itself uses Rails’ own parameterize method, but only after removing all apostrophes from the title’s value (so “Let’s Watch” becomes lets-watch, as opposed to let-s-watch).

What if you want to add the post’s ID to the beginning of the slug? Just set the on_field option to the name of any method that returns the basis for your slug (if no on_field is specified, the model’s to_s method is used). You can also name the slug storage field whatever you like, and pass it to sluggable in the slug_field option (slug is the default). I may add other slug formatting and validation options later as needed.

Right now, Namekuji’s tests are only run against ActiveRecord 4.2.6, but Neo4j.rb is also officially supported, and all tests for thetallgrass.net (which uses Neo4j and has 100% test coverage) pass with it in place. CI testing against both Neo4j.rb and Mongoid, and against multiple versions of Rails, are on the roadmap. Keep an eye on the Namekuji GitHub repository for updates and additional documentation.