controllers

A set of Rails rules for keeping controllers—the code that receives web requests and sends responses—small and focused.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing or reviewing Rails controllers, REST actions, request filters, response formats, and permitted user input.
Why use it?
It prevents request-handling code from becoming tangled with business rules, making the application easier to understand and change.

Cursor rule for Cursor

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/levifig/rails-instructions/controllers
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/levifig/rails-instructions

Made for: Cursor.

Per session 0 Nothing until a file matches its globs; then the whole rule loads.
When invoked 948 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00948
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00474
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00190
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00095

Measured yesterday against content hash 79fb754da7b5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

controllers scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.cursor/rules/rails/controllers.mdc · 164 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 164 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Rails Controllers Guide

Core Philosophy

  • Controllers handle HTTP requests and responses only
  • Keep controllers thin and focused
  • Business logic belongs in models or service objects
  • Follow RESTful conventions strictly
  • Design for clarity and maintainability

Controller Design Principles

  • One controller per resource
  • Seven standard RESTful actions maximum
  • Keep actions focused on single responsibilities
  • Handle multiple response formats gracefully
  • Maintain consistent patterns across controllers

RESTful Actions

  • Use only standard actions when possible: index, show, new, create, edit, update, destroy
  • Add custom actions sparingly and thoughtfully
  • Name custom actions with clear verbs
  • Group related actions in the same controller
  • Consider splitting into multiple resources instead of custom actions

Before Actions

  • Use before_action for common setup tasks
  • Keep filter methods private
  • Order filters from general to specific
  • Document filter purposes when not obvious
  • Avoid complex logic in filters

Strong Parameters

  • Always use strong parameters for user input
  • Define parameter methods as private
  • Be explicit about permitted attributes
  • Handle nested attributes appropriately
  • Document complex parameter structures

Response Handling

  • Support multiple formats (HTML, JSON, Turbo Stream)
  • Use consistent status codes
  • Provide meaningful error messages
  • Handle missing records gracefully
  • Implement proper content negotiation

Error Handling

  • Rescue specific exceptions at appropriate levels
  • Provide user-friendly error messages
  • Log errors with sufficient context
  • Use proper HTTP status codes
  • Handle errors consistently across controllers

Authentication and Authorization

  • Implement authentication in ApplicationController
  • Check authorization in before_action callbacks
  • Fail fast with unauthorized access
  • Provide clear feedback for access denied
  • Keep authorization logic simple and clear

Controller Concerns

  • Extract shared behavior into concerns
  • Name concerns based on functionality
  • Keep concerns focused and cohesive
  • Document concern dependencies
  • Test concerns in isolation

Read the full file on GitHub · 164 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 164 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 79fb754da7b5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

controllers is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository levifig/rails-instructions (54 stars, last pushed 1y ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 948 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.