Ruby on Rails™ 2.3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example

Chapter 7. Modeling and Viewing Users, Part II

In Chapter 6, we created the first iteration of a User model to represent users of our application, but the job is only half-done. Virtually any website with users, including ours, needs authentication as well, but currently any user signing up for the site would only have a name and email address, with no way to verify their identity. In this chapter, we’ll add the password attribute needed for an initial user signup (Chapter 8) and for signing in with an email/password combination (Chapter 9). In the process, we’ll reuse several of the ideas from Chapter 6, including migrations and validations, and also introduce some new ideas such as virtual attributes, private methods, and Active Record callbacks. ...