How to use e.g. url_for where you need it, not where you’ve been told to use it:

Rails 4

ActionController::Base.helpers.escape_javascript(text)
ActionController::Base.helpers.image_path(path)

Rails 3

class URLHelper
  include Singleton
  include ActionDispatch::Routing::UrlFor
  include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers
end

Rails 1-2.x

Use this snippet if you need to use one of the many Rails helpers in controllers or elsewhere:

class Helpers
    include Singleton
    include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::UrlHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::DateHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::TagHelper
    include ActionView::Helpers::ActiveRecordHelper
end

Console

You can test named routes in the console through the app object:

app.get '/'
# Named route
app.image_path Image.first

Usage

For example, to obfuscate email use the mail_to helper and set the encoding to JavaScript:

Helpers.instance.mail_to "[email protected]", "My email", :encode => "javascript"

In Rails controllers there's no need to do anything, simply use the template instance to call helpers:

def index
   @template.link_to x, x.title
end

Troubleshooting

If you get this error:

Missing host to link to! Please provide :host parameter or set default_url_options[:host]

Fix it by specifying the host:

URLHelper.default_url_options[:host] = 'xxx.com'

# Redirecting and scrolling down to the newly created comment
redirect_to(post_path(@comment.post, :anchor => dom_id(@comment)))