authentication from scratch

rubyonrails-talk
1

Could you please recommend tutorials on developing one's own authentication mechanisms, without the use of industrial-strength plugins?

Is this tutorial from 2006 obsolete?

   http://www.aidanf.net/rails_user_authentication_tutorial

I spent several person-days trying to install and use restful_authentication, but it was mostly a frustrating, labor-intensive exercise in futility. [1, 2] I then found this prescient article by David Heinemeier Hansson from 2005:

Ruby on Rails — Why engines and components are not evil but distracting

I don't share his philosophical issues with pluggable engines, but in practice, he seems to have been spot on. Impressive!

[1] The current issues are FixtureClassNotFound errors in the out-of-the-box unit tests on Debian; I've tried Ruby 1.87 and 1.9.1, each with two variations of restful-authentication:

   http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/    http://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication/tree/master

(Why are those different, anyway?) FWIW, after some minor bug-fixing, the plugin works fine on Mac OS X.

[2] I've also had headaches with git, which has a steep learning curve, no matter how vehemently Linus decrees otherwise.

2

Just for the record I installed and setup restful_authentication with no problems.

Persevere with git. It seems strange at first if you have been used to svn but after a while you will wonder how you managed without it. Particularly if you use it on your own projects.

Colin

3

Sure thing:

Cheers, Mark Turner

4

This issue went away when I tried

  script/generate authenticated user sessions

rather than

  script/generate authenticated users sessions

The plugin itself does not seem to have any problem with the plural "users", but the tests die (error, not failure) with unintuitive output.