Today I Learned: Rendering View and Layout in Rails

It’s possible to specify both the view and the layout when calling the render method in a Rails controller. Most examples of using the render method (at least that I’ve seen) only show how to specify the view, defaulting to the layout defined for the whole controller or application:

# renders the specified view within the layout defined at the controller level
render 'view_name'

But there may be times when you want a few controller methods to render a view within a different layout. You can accomplish that with:

# renders the specified view within the specified layout
render 'view_name', layout: 'layout_name'

Or, if the view is named following Rails conventions (matching the controller method name), you can just use:

# render the default view within the specified layout
render layout: 'layout_name'