Difficulty with Implementing User Authentication on My Rails Website

rubyonrails-talk
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I’ve been working on developing a website using Ruby on Rails, and I’ve encountered some challenges with implementing user authentication. I’ve tried using Devise gem, but I’m facing issues with customizing it to fit my specific requirements.

Here are the problems I’m encountering:

  1. Customization: I need to implement a custom authentication flow that includes additional fields beyond the basic email and password. How can I extend Devise to accommodate these additional fields while still maintaining its functionality?
  2. UI Integration: I’m struggling to integrate the authentication features seamlessly into my website’s UI. What are some best practices or resources for designing a user-friendly authentication interface in Rails?
  3. Testing: I want to ensure robust testing for my authentication system to prevent security vulnerabilities. What are the recommended strategies for testing authentication features in Rails applications?
  4. Performance: I’m concerned about the performance impact of the authentication system, particularly as the user base grows. Are there any optimizations or caching techniques that can help improve the performance of authentication operations in Rails?

I’d appreciate any insights, advice, or resources that the community can provide to help me overcome these challenges and implement a reliable and secure user authentication system for my Rails website. Thank you!

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I found this tutorial quite helpful to create a Rails app with authentication from scratch without devise. Another interesting solution is authentication-zero. Scaffolding for auth should also be coming in Rails 8.

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• Customization: I need to implement a custom authentication flow that includes additional fields beyond the basic email and password. How can I extend Devise to accommodate these additional fields while still maintaining its functionality?

This is pretty well supported, just not well documented. If you add custom methods to your application controller, overriding the validation, that is enough to trick Devise into using your additional fields. [1] Which leads me to your next question:

• UI Integration: I’m struggling to integrate the authentication features seamlessly into my website’s UI. What are some best practices or resources for designing a user-friendly authentication interface in Rails?

If you use the Rake task in Devise to export the views, you can edit them directly in your app. You’ll need to do this anyway to add fields to them, but you can also change the way they look to meet your UI and UX needs.

Walter

  1. Overload Devise to add parameters (Note! this is very old code, much may have changed in devise or the devise_invitable gem.) · GitHub