Restful authentication with Rails 2: Usage

This blog has been inactive for ages and one of my 2009 resolutions is to show the poor thing some love! I will try to keep it even if it’s the only resolution I don’t give up on. Things have become a bit less hectic at work (or maybe I’ve just gotten used to the system) and the spirit is willing so hopefully …

In my post detailing the installation of the Restful authentication plugin, it was pointed out to me in the comments that I didn’t show the actual usage of the plugin. My bad! This post will amend that oversight.

As an aside, while my tutorial post is still very relevant, I don’t do the installation from scratch anymore. In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned Bort and I still recommend it as a way of speeding up the initial setup of your rails project. However, the usage is the same whether you do the installation manually or use Bort.
Another Rails starter app I have used is leethal’s blank-rails-app. This is as light as they come and I use this when I do smaller sites in Rails rather than full fledged apps.

One of the advantages of installing manually is that Bort defaults to using RSpec as the test framework (at least on my system).
A manual installation checks for the presence of the spec folder and if it doesn’t exist, it creates the default Test::Unit tests.
However, Rails creates both a spec and test folder when i create a new Rails project (presumably because I’ve got the rspec gem installed ) and so to use Test::Unit I have to delete the spec folder before running the plugin’s generator.

To use the Restful Authentication plugin in your Rails app:

• Include AuthenticatedSystem
  The generated controllers include the AuthenticatedSystem module but we need this available to all controllers.
  Delete the ‘include AuthenticatedSystem’ line from the Sessions and Users controllers and move the line to the application controller.
  The AuthenticatedSystem module (located in lib/authenticated_system.rb) contains the core methods used in our application code for authentication.
• Add a before filter in the controllers you want to protect
  For any controller with actions that need protecting, add a before filter to the controller.

  class PageController < ApplicationController
  # protect all actions in this controller
  before_filter :login_required
  ...
  

  class PageController < ApplicationController
  # protect all actions in this controller except the index action
  before_filter :login_required, :except => :index
  ...
  

  class PageController < ApplicationController
  # protect all actions in this controller except the index and contact actions
  before_filter :login_required, :except => [:index, :contact]
  ...
  

  class PageController < ApplicationController
  # protect only the support action
  before_filter :login_required,  nly => :support
  ...
  

  For the protected actions, the user is redirected to the new session url. We’ve already added a named route called ‘login’ to the routes.rb file pointing to this same action and I’d rather have my urls end with ‘/login’ than ‘/sessions/new’.
  To do that I override the access_denied method in the application_controller.rb.

  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helper :all # include all helpers, all the time
  
  include AuthenticatedSystem
  
  def access_denied
  alias new_session_path login_path
  super
  end
  ...
  

• Use the plugin methods in your controller

  def index
  if logged_in?
  @profile = current_user.profile
  # or
  # @profile = Profile.find(current_user)
  end
  end
  

• Use the plugin methods in your view

  
  <% if logged_in? %>
  Welcome <%= current_user.login %>
  Your Profile: <%= @profile.description %>
  <% end %>
  

And that’s all there is to it. Now get building!

Related posts:

1. Restful Authentication with rails 2
2. Jump start your next Rails 2 application