I'm trying to create a login system in Rails 3 where I can access the logged in user not only from the views but also from the controller/model level. The reason is that I want to adapt functionality according to a privilege system where logged in users may execute different functions than those that are not logged in.
Up to this point, I tried to implement the login system from railstutorial.com, chapter 9.
When I use the login system only from the view, it works. However, if I try to use the system via a controller, I get the error undefined method 'cookie_jar' for nil:NilClass.
Thank you for any help or best practices you can provide for creating an authentication system where the logged in user can be identified from a controller.
The best advice here is probably "don't". If you want an authentication system, use something like Devise - which has had a lot of time and effort spent making sure that evildoers can't get in
If you want different users to execute different functions, this is access control, and for that you probably want something like cancan or ACL
And you want access to the logged in user from the model level? Again, the best practice is "don't". The model should have no interest in the currently logged in user - that is a matter for the controller.
(That said, rules are sometimes made to be broken - if you are doing an audit trail and need to store information about the user who made a change, for example, passing the currently logged in user to the model may be the best answer ....)
And finally, if you really, really want to do it all from scratch, take a look at this railscast
An extremely simple way is to do it as mentioned in railscast episode : http://railscasts.com/episodes/20-restricting-access
As mentioned in the screen cast, you can use the plugin acts as authenticated (http://www.railsrocket.com/acts_as_authenticated-plugin) for all your user model needs.
If everything done according to the tutorial you should be able to get current_user from both controllers and views. There's also another tutorial on authentication on asciicasts.com by Ryan Bates. You may want to explore it if you are just starting Rails, but for real-life applications it's highly recommended to use Devise or AuthLogic, which are thoroughly tested and constantly evolving.
Related
I have an existing rails app with Mongo DB.Currently the app can be accessed by anyone that is every method in Portfolio controller and customer controller. Now I want that Portfolio controller should only be accessed by sign in user. How can I do that. I tried using active_admin but was unsuccessful.
You're looking for User Authentication. Try any authentication plugin like Devise or Clearance to sign in and distinguish individual users (more options here) or, even better at first, try building your own authentication solution alongside some of these excellent RailsCasts on User authentication (the paid episodes are totally worth it!). You'll learn how the different moving parts fit together real quick.
You might also want to consider using the Sorcery (https://github.com/NoamB/sorcery) gem as another option. It has links to the railscasts on the github repo there which helped a lot, and myself as a beginner found the wiki to be incredibly in-depth. Super easy to use.
I have seen lots of similar questions here but nothing that quite fits my need.
I am a pretty experience rails developer but this new project is my first time using both Rails 3 and Devise (I'm normally on authlogic).
My app has two different models that I want to authenticate via devise.
One, User is just a standard users model
Two, Business is similar to a user, (it has an email address column too) but it has additional info in the database (address, phone number, etc..)
I want to be able to log them both in via the same login form. Then obviously once they are logged in they will be presented with different info depending on what type of Model has logged in.
It may or may not be relevant that I was planning on using OmniAuth to allow Users (though probably not businesses) to sign up/on via facebook.
Thanks!
What's the easiest way to go about doing this?
I think the only way to handle this would be to have your own custom sign in form and controller that determined the type of user and then sign them in correctly. I would recommend an approach like what mark mentioned for simplicity (take a look at something like CanCan to manage roles).
Another potential problem with having multiple user models is that you will have multiple versions of all the devise helper methods. So for current_<resource> and <resource>_signed_in? you would have current_user, current_business_user, user_signed_in? and business_user_signed_in?. Then you would either have to implement your own versions of these methods or you would need to check both versions everywhere you used them.
Can do this in application_controller?
current_user = current_resource_a || current_resource_b
First, my obligatory "I'm new to rails" statement: I'm new to rails.
Sorry for the following long-winded expository stuff, but I want to make sure I'm asking my question clearly. I'm building a sample manager for a small analytical lab. So far I have built the core user stuff using devise to manage sessions (Basically so I can use all of Devise's nice helper methods throughout my app). The users don't need to be securely separated, so there is no sign in form, it just automatically signs them in for whatever action the user wishes to do.
I would like to put a front door on the website for macro-security that signs in to either the user version of the site (described above) or the admin version. I understand how to implement this using Devise, however, I am unsure as to whether Rails allows this sort of double-session where there's a macro-security session on constantly while a bunch of internal sessions are created and destroyed. Again, sorry for the long-windedness and thanks for your time and help!
Decided to just give it a shot and it turns out it worked. I have to test to see if there are any kinks in the functionality, but as it stands it works well as a front-door while allowing the internal transient sessions.
I know there are role based authorization gems/plugins for rails to determine if a user can do things based on which role their in. However, is there a best-practice approach to hiding actions from users based on ownership? ie: the show/edit/destroy methods for a user should only be available if they're being performed on the currently logged in user id. Hopefully that makes sense, but I've written some methods to protect against non-owners accessing methods and its become a bit bloated and ugly.
Look at cancan's implementation.
I can recommend on restful_authentication( https://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication ). quick tutorial http://railscasts.com/episodes/67-restful-authentication
I'm slowly but surely putting together my first rails app (first web-app of any kind in fact - I'm not really a programmer) and it's time to set up a user registration/login system. The nature of my app is such that each user will be completely separated from each other user (except for admin roles). When users log in they will have their own unique index page looking at only their data which they and no-one else can ever see or edit. However, I may later want to add a role for a user to be able to view and edit several other user's data (e.g. a group of users may want to allow their secretary to access and edit their data but their secretary would not need any data of their own).
My plan is to use authlogic to create the login system and declarative authorization to control permissions but before I embark on this fairly major and crucial task I thought I would canvas a few opinions as to whether this combo was appropriate for the tasks I envisage or whether there would be a better/simpler/faster/cheaper/awesomer option.
What about cancan by Ryan Bates?
Here you can get a complete visual guided implementation
Take a look at this, it might help:
Basic Rails 3 engine utilizing Authlogic, CanCan and Easy Roles
What about Devise? Take a look at the railscasts.com site.