links in email breaking - ruby-on-rails

I have a rails application and am using devise for authentication. I notice that when the email for resetting the password goes through in production then the link to reset the password breaks and it redirects to my root URL.
In development it takes me to the sign in page and a flash message appears which says that I cannot access this page without a valid token, and must provide the full URL.
while I have customized the look of the email, I am using the devise methods in order to generate the links, viz. edit_password_url(#resource, reset_password_token: #token) %>
this should ideally come up in the development environment as
http://localhost:3000/users/password/edit?reset_password_token=[GENERATED_TOKEN]
however it is coming up as follows as observed from the server logs:
http://localhost:3000/users/password/edit?reset_pass=
word_token=3DQaz7y_f63yR3MZmReUY5
on two separate lines. In production I am using sendgrid so I cannot see the url being generated by inspecting the link.
I also notice that every = sign gets converted to an =3D
Looking forward to some suggestions. Please do let me know if I must provide any more data.

I did figure out the problem, which as it turns out had nothing to do with the transfer encoding.
At the receiving end the urls do get full resolved properly in spite of the content transfer encoding.
However since I was auto generating the links, they were being generated and sent as http links. I am using a CDN that redirects all traffic over https a page rule I had added there to resolve a few issues, was causing this http link to redirect over https and eventually to the application root. This is what was causing the problem.
Generating an absolute url with https is what was required.

Related

Rails links in mailer are invalid (Liquid gem)

There are template witch are written by admins. And in mail there possibility to enter link (not the rails way). There is editing menu, what generates following, basic html code:
company’s profile
where user.owner_name - domain.com/user/user_name
I don't talk about localhost because it possible will not work. So I'm talking about production server.
I receive email, with broken link (if I click on it - it's not opening) but if copy link:
x-webdoc://73A3A2DC-F22E-4558-8853-C6A57985EE7C/mydomaine.com/user/
Why this appears?
EDIT
It seems it's realeted to MacOs. It prbolem appears when I view letter thorought Mail App, or Safari browser.
Now, I need any advise how to avoide this prob.
I would argue that example.com/user/user_name is not a useful URI in the context of an email, because it is missing a protocol (like: http://example.com/user/user_name). Without the protocol it could be misunderstood as a relative URL, which may lead to security issues or at least is useless in the context of an email client.
From that point of view, it is not surprising to me that some email clients or web mailers are trying to be smart and protect the user by annotating the URL in some way.
In this example the added x-webdoc: indicates that the user has to make the decision on what application to use to open that link because without a proper protocol it is not obvious what application will be able to handle the URI. See What is x-webdoc?

Authenticate user before displaying an iFrame

I am preparing to work on a project where I need to display a dashboard from an online application. Unfortunately, the use of an API is currently not possible. The dashboard can be embedded in an iFrame. However, when it is displayed it will prompt the user viewing the dashboard to login to an account.
I have one paid account to this service. Are there any rails gems to login to the service before the iFrame is processed?
Or would a proxy within my rails app be a better route to go?
Any pointers are appreciated!
Neither a Rails gems nor a proxy within your rails will work and they same have the same limitation.
They are both running on the back-end, server side.
The authentication you need is client side.
Unless you mean proxy the ENTIRE thing, the auth request and all subsequent requests and user interactions with this dashboard. That should work but (see below)
The way authentication works (pretty much universally) is: once you log in to any system, it stores a cookie on your browser and then the browser sends that cookie for every subsequent request.
If you authenticate on the backend, that cookie will be sent to your rails code and will die there, and the users browser will never know about it.
Also - it is not possible to do the auth server side and capture the cookie and then have the user browse the site with their browser directly, for two reasons:
Sometimes auth cookies use information about the browser or HTTP client to encrypt the cookie, so sending the same cookie from a different client wont work
You can not tell a browser to send a cookie to a domain different than your own.
So your options are, off the top of my head right now:
If there is a login page that accepts form submissions from other domains, you could try to simulate a form submission directly to that sites "after login" page. (The page the user gets directed to once they fill up the login form). Any modern web framework as XSRF protection (Cross Site Request Forgery protection) and will disallow this approach for security reasons.
See if the auth this site uses has any kind of OAUTH, Single Sign On (SSO) or similar type of authentication integration that you can do. (Similar to an API, so you may have already explored this option)
Proxy all requests to this site through your server. You will have to rewrite the entire HTML so that all images, CSS, stylesheets, and all other assets are also routed through the proxy or else the URLs are rewritten in the HTML to not be relative. You might hit various walls if a site wasn't designed for this use case. From things like the site using relative URL's for assets that you aren't proxying, the site referencing non-relative URL's causing cross-domain errors, etc. Note its really hard to re-write every single last assets reference, its not only the HTML you're worried about, Javascript can have URL's in it too, and CSS can as well.
You could write a bookmarklet or a browser extension that logs the user into the site.
Have everyone install Lastpass
Have everyone install the TamperMonkey browser extension (and others like it for other browser), and write a small User Script to run custom javascript automatically to log the user in on that site
Scrape that site for the info you need and serve it on your own site.
OK I'm out of ideas. :)

Rails, Devise, and multiple domains

Let's say I have an application that's going to be accessed from completely different domains that all point at the same server*:
example.com, example.net, foobar.com, ...
I have a Devise based authentication system that's worked fine before. However, the goal is now to add HTTPS to the sign in system. The problem is, as it turns out, there is no way to host more than one HTTPS website on the same IP address**. To resolve this problem, I set up the login pages to always POST to https://secure.example.com. As far as I can tell, this is working fine. Devise seems to have no qualm with it. However, the tricky part is that the user now needs to be redirected to foobar.com, which also needs to understand that the user is logged in. I pass the site to return to in a hidden parameter in the login form, and the redirection works fine. I still have no way to inform foobar.com that the user is now logged in.
I've managed to set it up so that, upon being returned to foobar.com, it copies the user's session cookie for secure.example.com into a new cookie for foobar.com. This part is working fine. However, in the Rails console, the web requests for secure.example.com and foobar.com - with the same cookie sent for each - produce two completely different sessions and therefore, it's no wonder Devise acts like the user was never logged in to foobar.com
Does anyone know why this wouldn't work - why two identical web requests (only the domain of the request URI was different - I tried it in Firebug, too) would produce two completely different sessions in a Rails 3 app with different, yet consistent, session ids? More to the point, does anyone know how to MAKE this work?
* assume, for the purposes of this exercise, that this is unavoidable and the sites cannot be hosted all under different subdomains, and that the number of domains required is too great to get a separate IP address for each.
** unless they're subdomains and you have an *.example.com cert, but that's beside the point.
If you're already using Devise, I suggest you try using token authenticatable. You can generate a token for the user in question, redirect them with the token to sign in, and then quickly expire the token after they have signed in.
You could also try rolling your own OAuth provider with doorkeeper.

Groovy/GSP redirect around controller

I have a web application that I am trying not to recompile since there is little documentation and the environment is a little sensitive.
With that in mind, all I am trying to do is hijack the authentication mechanism to redirect to one of a couple replacement websites. To that end, there is an authentication service and an authentication controller. The website redirects to /auth/login when the user comes unauthenticated.
In the views folder I have built an alternative /auth/login_new.gsp and from there can authenticate the user and get a redirection back to /auth/redirect.gsp at some frequency but not 100%. That redirect page takes a value from the DB and redirects the user to the correct follow on website. When I run authentication from /auth/login, the site ignores the redirect request to /auth/redirect.gsp.
I had set the show pages for all the different controllers to window.location.href="/auth/redirect.gsp" but I can't get it to go there 100%. I have also reset the layout/domain.gsp file to gut the other functionality of the site and script redirect as well. I was getting errors with duplicate redirect attempts, but now I just go to a dead/gutted homepage...
Any suggestions on how I can dodge the recompile?
Thanks
Leif

Devise throwing HTTP auth on XHR and logging out

I'm having a ton of issues with Devise, using OmniAuth, to authenticate my Rails app. I relaunch my server and open up a new tab in Incognito mode (so that the cookies are cleared) and load my app. I log in, and then go through to the app.
When I get to a page that calls an authenticated action via AJAX, it asks for a username and password via HTTP Basic Authentication. I've disabled this in my devise.rb.
config.http_authenticatable = false
config.http_authenticatable_on_xhr = false
When I then go back to a previous page, it redirects me to the login page and asks for a login. This also happens when I visit a page that doesn't require authentication and then go back to an authenticated page.
This is getting immensely frustrating. I've unpacked Devise and Warden to my vendor/gems directory so that I can try to debug it, but I honestly can't figure out where to begin. Any help would be hugely appreciated.
Your AJAX call probably isn't setting the CSRF token. You might need to update your UJS gem (jquery-rails probably) or manually set the X-CSRF-Token HTTP header to the value of the tag. See this question: Devise session immediately expiring on .js call [AJAX]. You can test if this is the problem by disabling CSRF protection temporarily by chucking config.allow_forgery_protection = false in config/application.rb.
If you go the manual route, you should probably grab the value of the 'authenticity_token' meta tag first, and use that as the name of the actual token meta tag, rather than hard coding the reference to 'csrf-token'.
I would recommend updating to Rails 3.0.10 or 3.1 if you can. I was still having problems on 3.0.7.

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