Matching a format only Rails route

On a recent project I noticed several errors for an invalid route requested by a search bot where the URL looked something like:

/people/123706399_571n.jpg

which in turn triggered the people show route that looks for:

/people/123-full-name

Since the parsed value 123706399_571n isn’t a valid person id we’d be receiving about 4-5 daily errors in Airbrake.

I figured this should be easy enough to fix with a one line redirect in the routes config that after a week or so I could remove as the search bot would have picked up the redirect by then. Since the invalid URL is matching the people show route, I just duplicated that and added the necessary format specific properties below:

get 'people/:id',
  format: true,
  constraints: { format: /(jpg|jpeg)/ },
  to: redirect("/people")

get 'people/:id' => 'people#show'

At first I just had the constraints hash since from my understanding I thought that was all that was needed. Testing proved otherwise as even a valid request for a person detail page would result in a redirect when it shouldn’t. The reason is that Rails will match both versions of the route, one with the format and the other without (which is the default) despite setting the format constraints. To avoid the behavior of the default route match we also set format: true so the redirect route is only applied if the URL has a jpg format.