I'm looking to build an application that handles authentication and authorization for a variety of smaller apps that may or may not be rails applications (e.g. some with sinatra, some with non-ruby frameworks, etc). These applications will be on separate domains.
Can I do this with Authlogic? I do not want to setup a rails application for each application, just use a central authenticator. I'm sure as I start reading and working the answer would become evident, but I'm trying to avoid a dead end (doing work and research, then finding out this can't be done.)
From what I've read this is a use case, and I'm looking for input from people who've done similar. This is at the idea stage so if i can offer more detail, let me know.
I think you are planning to build a cross domain, single sign-on service. Besides building your own, there are a quite a few project that do this out of the box.
rubycas is one of them : http://code.google.com/p/rubycas-server/
You could also look into open Id (http://openid.net), where the login functionality is done by a third party authentication server.
In case you want to roll your own:
It doesn't really matter which authentication plugin/system you will use. (I would choose devise/warden, but Authlogic will do just fine). Instead you need to focus on understanding the security problems and the http interaction between your service, the browser and the application for which authentication is used. I think it's doable, but you need to know what you are doing.
Today, the cool kids use warden, or the railsy thingy devise.
Im not sure but i think you cant use authlogic with a non-ruby-app.
I would probably go with Devise as well but you should look into some plugins for it like JanRain's Engage (used to be RPX Now). It allows you to use quite a few social login options (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) http://www.janrain.com/products/engage.
Ryan Bates from Railscasts.com just posted an episode on Devise using Engage this morning. http://railscasts.com/episodes/233-engage-with-devise
There are some more episodes about Devise on Railscasts too. http://railscasts.com/episodes?search=devise
If I were you I wouldn't reinvent the wheel. I'd use a third party service to authenticate and just get on with the project. Social connectors such as Engage will provide this functionality for you without all the time and expertise.
Related
As stated in the title, when should devise be used and when should I, instead, implement my own authentication. In essence, I'm wondering whether the created authentications in some tutorials (such as this one) are secure and safe.
If I don't need email confirmation, recoverability, etc. (a lot of the "jazz" associated with Devise), would the account information be just as secure as if I created my own?
If you still may be confused by what answer I'm looking for – is Devise something you should use whenever possible/whenever you have accounts? Or should it really be a decision?
Note: I'm not specifically referring to Devise, any authentication gems may be replaced.
implement my own authentication
Anytime you start thinking whether you should create your own authentication, you need to stop. Take that idea, shred it, douse it with gasoline, and burn it!
Authentication is hard. There are subtleties that exist in authentication and developers that are used to CRUD style programming are going to miss them. This isn't meant to be an insult. I am one of those programmers, and I work in security. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses.
Devise (and most popular authentication frameworks) have had thousands of hours of code review, design, testing, and time in production versus the framework that you're going to roll yourself.
I wrote a blog post about a "smart" security feature that actually made a company's security worse. This is a good example of how subtle authentication and security can be!
I used to use gems like Devise until Rails added the has_secure_password to ActiveRecord. Now I always roll my own since in the end I always need some custom stuff that makes it hard to implement in an existing library.
Ryan Bates have an excellent video on just this topic here.
In my opinion you should decide it according to your project. If you are working on small web-service with minimalistic functionality you can add your own auth using instruments provided by Rails. But if you are working on so-called "enterprise", big project with fast-growing functionality you should definitely use devise, since with this gem, you will not spend time on building existing auth features, it is very easy in maintenance and secure.
So, this may be a kind of dumb question, but I checked the Google and got no hits. We want to host multiple Rails apps in a way that makes them look homogeneous. We want all the apps to have the same look and feel, and all the apps to use the same sign-on database.
Theming I think we could accomplish by just putting the site theme into a gem, and requiring that gem from our github repository in each app. However, auth is trickier.
I know that I can achieve this "for free" by just not making the different portions of the site (store, chat forums, etc.) different apps. If they're all, say, Rails Engines, we can basically drop them into the same application with their own namespaced routes, and have a single plugin that does auth.
However, for various reasons we'd like to keep these separate apps, if that's technically possible. The number one reason is scalability; since this will be a hosted site, we want the flexibility to spin up more instances of, say, the store (perhaps to handle a holiday sale rush), without needing to spin up the chat forums. Also, we want to be able to completely isolate the portions of the code that AREN'T intertwined.
Ideally, the databases would be separate too (keeping us from falling back into the rut of "put everything including the kitchen sink in the db"), but I do know that one "cheap" way to do cross-app auth is just to use the same plugin (say, Devise), and just point to the same DB.
So, I'm thinking that maybe the way to do this is to auth via a web service call. Is this prior art -- does anyone have a gem for this that "just works" so that authentication can be shared across all apps? Or am I just entering into a world of pain by trying to build things this way?
Thanks in advance!
You could do a single sign on approach described at:
http://blog.joshsoftware.com/2010/12/16/multiple-applications-with-devise-omniauth-and-single-sign-on/
The single sign on approach with oauth and devise has some drawbacks. The main problem I had was I was unable to extend the timeout time across multiple apps.
This question aims to understand RoR and frameworks in general. It looks like RoR never had any standard user authentication system. Was it just historical reason (just happened naturally as it did)... or could it be intentional? Because RoR is a website building tool, more often than not, user authentication is a crucial part of a website.
To put it into perspective, another question is, do other popular frameworks, Django, Symfony, CakePHP, have user authentication built in?
There is no reasonably generic way to do user authentication. Most frameworks leave it up to you to choose the plugin that most closely matches what you're trying to accomplish.
For example, consider these two situations:
a blog which has a single administrator with password-protected admin-facing tools
a site like YouTube which allows users to sign up and administer their own content
Both of these sites would require vastly different authentication systems; which of these systems should Rails cater to out-of-the-box?
The Rails core team wanted to ensure that Rails was open-ended enough to make anything you want. There is no one-size-fits-all authentication scheme, so the core team decided to leave it out. Rails is easily extendable via gems and plugins, so that is where they belong.
Some examples are Warden and the Rails Warden plugin, Devise, Authlogic, and Restful Authentication.
CakePHP has a built in Authentication component that is pretty straight forward and easy to implement.
Most of these frameworks you mentioned are toolkits, not complete products. You build these things yourself, or leverage plugins from the community. Django's admin plugin/module has authentication out of the box though. Drupal does too, as a matter of fact.
Authentication can be(and is in my opinion) a matter of taste and need. If Rails was including things like that, it would start to become a website and not a framework. The programmer has to be free to choose among various implementations. That is why gems are available.
I've been programming a little in Rails and CakePHP, and I can say that Rails doesn't need to provide a mechanism like this. The community is very very good, and there are many examples (already said, like Devise, Authlogic...) made by very good programmers. Of course, there are many tutorials online (and also, railscasts, which are simply awesome) to program a succesful set-up for your project. So, if we have all of this, why should we need something like cakePHP mechanism? It's OK, it works, but there's just a very good tutorial and that's all( and maybe enough..). So, in the end, if u have a nice community you shouldn't care about the core of the technology, there will be always someone else more experienced with your needs that will do it for you. And if you don't find it, do it by yourself and in the proccess you will find a lot of help! :)
Im learning Rails by building apps.
I want to make my first authenticated app: users signup, login, do some changes in models they have access to and logout.
I did the Google search but it is quite confusing: many plugins, many tutorials. Don't know where to start.
Is there a state-of-the-art authentication method for Rails? What do you use in Production to authenticate your users?
Any help in this will be helpful. Thanks
I've used authlogic in the past and have been quite happy with it. Ryan has a railscast (video tutorial) for authlogic here.
+1 to Jason, -1 to NSD and sparky. Authentication system is not the thing you want to build yourself, at least if you're aiming for production use. It's like inventing your own encryption algorithm - it's a lot more safe to use something extensively tested and well-developed.
I've also been using authlogic, but there are some alternatives over there - like the good old restful authentication, and devise, which I guess is more modern so to speak. BTW the two latest railscasts are devoted to devise.
If your application is simple and just want a simple and secure user login page you might want to look into the Restful Authentication plugin. Its very easy to use and if you don't have much authentication requirements this should do fine.
script/plugin install git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git
script/generate authenticated user sessions
rake db:migrate
You can find out more by checking out this excellent railscast.
As A beginner I would recommend Restful Authentication as its simple to set up and will get you up and running with no time
following is a step by step guid
http://avnetlabs.com/rails/restful-authentication-with-rails-2
and authlogic - (http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic) is another great plug in which is more flexible but requires some work to implement user registration and stuff
cheers,
sameera
One man's state-of-the-art authentication system is another man's worthless pile of garbage. You're almost always better off rolling your own in the long run. O'Reilly's Ruby Cookbook has some extremely basic examples that will set you off in the right general direction, then you can decide whether or not other people's solutions are right for you.
I would agree with NSD. Figuring out the plugins & how they should mesh with your application to me longer than creating an auth system in my latest application.
My tips - create a user_sessions controller and use normal CRUD methods to handle creating/destroying (ie logging in & out). Create another model for the user - it can handle create accounts & updating (ie changing passwords). Stick a :before_filter on each controller which needs protection.
I'm looking for a quality Administrative plugin for Rails. It seems that most of the existing plugins/gems (e.g. "restful_authentication", "acts_as_authenticated") revolve around self-signup, etc. However, I'm looking for a full-featured Administrative/Management role-based type of solution -- but not one that's simply tacked on to another non-role-based solution.
If I can't find one, I suppose I'll roll my own...just wasn't looking to re-invent the wheel.
Ryan Bates has recently made two railscasts on authorization (note the difference between authentication and authorization; authentication checks if a user is who she says she is, authorization checks if the user has access to a resource). Episode #188 is on declarative_authorization, which is a really powerful authorization plugin. Episode #192 (sorry, I don't have enough reputation to link to it) is about Ryan Bates' own CanCan plugin, which is a much simpler plugin, but it would still work for most apps.
There are a few out there. I have used:
http://github.com/DocSavage/rails-authorization-plugin/ for applications before in conjunction with restufl_authentication, but I believe it will work with any authentication that gives you a current_user method. On github there is also http://github.com/mdarby/restful_acl/ and http://github.com/danryan/role_model/, they are just role based stuff though I'd say not authentication as well.
The authentication and the access control role based stuff are all available as seperate plugins/gems to the best of my knowledge, and that's a good thing as they are different beasts. Not all apps that have authentication need to have ACL type stuff and even some that do only need a really simple am I an admin kind of thing rather than a full blown user roles thing. So I'd say if you want one that does it all you'll have to write, if you don't want to do that than I'd say a combination of either Authlogic or restful_authentication with on of the authorization plugins will do the trick quite nicely.
You might check out the links in "Which Rails plug in is best for role based permission?".
None of the solutions listed there seem very appealing to me. The top contender, role_requirement apparently requires restful_authentication, but I find AuthLogic much better designed and less intrusive. The others listed seem to not be very actively maintained.