Chapter 14. Users and Authentication
While sessions expand your application-building possibilities, almost any interactive
application that will be around for a while needs to be able to keep track of users. You might
be a little startled to hear that Rails itself doesnât include any mechanisms for
tracking users, unlike most current web frameworks. That isnât so much a failure as an
opportunity for developers to create their own authentication approaches. When getting started, however, itâs probably wisest to work
with the commonly used restful_authentication
plug-in. (The code for this example is available in ch14/students007.)
Note
Note that the restful_authentication
plug-in is based
on the older acts_as_authenticated
plug-in. Many
applications use, and much documentation describes, acts_as_authenticated
, which has similar data structures but doesnât
operate in a RESTful way.
Installation
Authentication is a complicated enough project that itâs worth fitting into a more
sophisticated application, like the students and courses example. The first step toward
adding authentication to it is to install the restful_authentication
plug-in. From the application directory, enter:
$script/plugin install http://svn.techno-
weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication
Warning
More recent versions of restful_authentication
have
moved to a different location, git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git. Using that version, which has changed slightly from the one described ...
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