Rails Model, belongs to many

Many-to-many relationships in rails don't use belongs_to. Instead, you want to use one of a couple options. The first is has_and_belongs_to_many:

# app/models/category.rb
class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :items
end

# app/models/item.rb
class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :categories
end

And you'll need to add an extra join table in your database, with a migration like this:

class AddCategoriesItems < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :categories_items, :id => false do |t|
      t.integer :category_id
      t.integer :item_id
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :categories_items
  end
end

You can see that the join table's name is the combination of the two other tables' names. The tables must be mentioned in alphabetical order as above, and the :id => false needs to be there, since we don't want a primary key on this table. It will break the rails association.

There's also another, more complex method known as has_many :through if you need to store info about the relationship itself. I've written a whole article detailing how to do both methods, and when to use each:

Basic many-to-many Associations in Rails

I hope this helps, and contact me if you have any other questions!

This is what @Jaime Bellmyer used

# app/models/category.rb
class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :items
end

# app/models/item.rb
class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_and_belongs_to_many :categories
end

I would recommend using this

# app/models/category.rb
class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :category_items
  has_many :items, :through => :category_items
end

# app/models/item.rb
class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :category_items
  has_many :categories, :through => :category_items
end

# app/models/category_items.rb
class CategoryItems < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :category
  belongs_to :items
end

If you use this you will have a join model which will give you more control over handling Category and Item. But using what @Jaime suggested you will have only a join table and not a model, which will not be under control.