Ruby on Rails/Passenger/Capistrano error message in rendering ERB file. Whats going on

Question

I have recently decided to deploy my site test onto my home server using a combination of Ruby on Rails, Passenger (mod_rails)/Apache and Capistrano to deploy. I am trying to render my home page, which at the moment has no database related elements and is all very simple.

The file I'm trying to render is:

<footer>
  <nav class="round">
    <ul>
      <li><%= link_to "About", '#', %></li>
      <li><%= link_to "Contact", '#', %></li>
    </ul>
  </nav>
</footer>

I'm sure its simple syntax or something, but here is the error log part that I believe is important:

  Rendered layouts/_footer.html.erb (9.4ms)
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 276ms

ActionView::Template::Error (/var/rails/releases/20120309031203/app/views/layouts/_footer.html.erb:4: syntax error, unexpected ')'
...pend= ( link_to "About", '#', );@output_buffer.safe_concat('...
...                               ^
/var/rails/releases/20120309031203/app/views/layouts/_footer.html.erb:5: syntax error, unexpected ')'
...nd= ( link_to "Contact", '#', );@output_buffer.safe_concat('...
...                               ^
/var/rails/releases/20120309031203/app/views/layouts/_footer.html.erb:10: syntax error, unexpected keyword_ensure, expecting ')'
/var/rails/releases/20120309031203/app/views/layouts/_footer.html.erb:12: syntax error, unexpected keyword_end, expecting ')'):
    1: <footer>
    2:   <nav class="round">
    3:     <ul>
    4:       <li><%= link_to "About", '#', %></li>
    5:       <li><%= link_to "Contact", '#', %></li>
    6:     </ul>
    7:   </nav>
  app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:16:in `_app_views_layouts_application_html_erb___909272938_79472450'

I hope this is enough, but if you need more, please ask. Thanks.

Answer 1

the root cause is this line of code:

<li><%= link_to "About", '#', %></li>

here, the link_to() method only accept 2 parameters ("about", "#"), however there's a "," in the end. so it got errors.

Also, if you just want to render a link such as:

<a href="#">About</a>

Please use "link_to_function" instead. e.g.

<li><%= link_to_function "About", '#' %></li>

Answer 2

What are those commas doing there, hanging at the end of the link_to calls?

<li><%= link_to "About", '#', %></li>
<li><%= link_to "Contact", '#', %></li>

Try:

  <li><%= link_to "About", '#' %></li>
  <li><%= link_to "Contact", '#' %></li>