How to Get the Current Absolute URL in Rails

Every Rails controller includes two accessor methods pointing to the request and the response objects associated with the current HTTP request cycle. The request method returns an instance of the ActionDispatch::Request class, which wraps the HTTP request and provides a nice API to inspect the request.

Use original_url method on the request object to get the current absolute URL.

# Returns the original request URL as a `String`

# get "/articles?page=2"

request.original_url # => "http://www.example.com/articles?page=2"

Here's the source code for this method.

def original_url
  base_url + original_fullpath
end

The base_url returns the URL containing the protocol and the domain, and the original_fullpath returns a String with the requested path, including the query params.  

If you don't care about the protocol and domain, use the original_fullpath or the fullpath method on the request. It returns the path including params.

# get "/articles"
request.fullpath # => "/articles"

# get "/articles?page=2"
request.fullpath # => "/articles?page=2"

Here's some other information available on the request object.