Learning Rails

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 doesn’t include any mechanisms for tracking users, unlike most current web frameworks. That isn’t so much a failure as an opportunity for developers to create their own authentication approaches. When getting started, however, it’s 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 doesn’t operate in a RESTful way.

Installation

Authentication is a complicated enough project that it’s 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

In Heroku, you’ll want to use the Gems & Plugins link under the vendor folder in the editor. In addition to the usual list of files being added, this installer reports some documentation and security issues. Definitely read ...