I ran into an issue on a client project this week where we needed to validate a URL in our Ruby on Rails application, but wanted to check that it actually existed in addition to validating the format with a regular expression. After some minor searching, I ran across Ilya Grigorik's blog (that's been happening a lot lately for some reason.) He provided a nice little ActiveRecord validator that uses Net:HTTP to ping a domain and validate that it returns a 200 code (HTTPSuccess).
As it turns out, his post (and thereby his method) was a bit outdated, so I put together an updated validator that takes advantage of the new "sexy validations" provided in Rails 3. And here it is:
To get up and running, create a new file in your Rails lib directory called "uri_validator.rb", and copy/paste the above code. If you have added the lib directory to your autoload paths, then you're done! Otherwise, you'll want to include the file in your environment.rb or application.rb files (in your config directory) like so:
Finally, to use the new sexy validator, simply add the :uri option to any existing validates call:
This allows you to specify a custom format (must be a valid regular expression); otherwise, the format will default to URI::regexp(%w(http https)).
There it is, if you come up with your own variations of the validator or regex, don't forget to tell me about them!
By the way, just wanted to give a personal shout out to Ilya for his fantastic support of his new non-blocking EventMachine based ruby web server, Goliath. Hey man, you might want to change the name to David: I was going to make some crack here about his sling (not to be - or maybe? - confused with David's Sling) being asynchronous, but you get the idea :). Anyway, rock on.
