authentication

Devise for Rails

Adding authentication

Objectives
Understand the need for authentication
Install and Configure Devise for Rails
Create views for registration process
Register a new user

Adding authentication and authorization is extremely vital to any modern web application. The need for basic security and authenticaiton is essential for good data and customer experience. We will spend today adding the 'Devise' gem to our blog appliction. This is a program that will help us integrate the tools needed to authenticate and authorize users. With this gem we will not need to write the complicated code needed to add security to our pages.

Add devise gem

Open up your Gemfile and add this line

gem 'devise'

and run

bundle install

Set up devise in your app

Run the following command in the terminal.

rails g devise:install

Configure Devise

Ensure you have defined default url options in your environments files. Open up config/environments/development.rb and add this line:

   config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: 'localhost', port: 3000 }

before the end keyword.

Open up app/views/layouts/application.html.erb and add:

  <% if notice %>
    <p class="alert alert-success"><%= notice %></p>
  <% end %>
  <% if alert %>
    <p class="alert alert-danger"><%= alert %></p>
  <% end %>

right above: <%= yield %>

At this point we have effectively implemented the 'Devise' gem into the application and we are ready to create our 'User' model and add security to it.

Setup the User model

We’ll use a bundled generator script to create the User model.

   rails g devise user
   rails generate devise:install
   rake db:migrate

Create your first user

Now that you have set everything up you can create your first user. Devise creates all the code and routes required to create accounts, log in, log out, etc.

Make sure your rails server is running, 'YOUR_CLOUD_NINE_ADDRESS/users/sign_up' and create your user account.

You can test whether the user was registered by going to the rails console and typing 'User.all'. If your registration was successful you should see the user in the records of the User model

Add sign-up and login links

All we need to do now is to add appropriate links or notice about the user being logged in in the top right corner of the navigation bar.

In order to do that, edit app/views/layouts/application.html.erb add:

  <p class="navbar-text pull-right">
  <% if user_signed_in? %>
    Logged in as <strong><%= current_user.email %></strong>.
    <%= link_to 'Edit profile', edit_user_registration_path, :class => 'navbar-link' %> |
    <%= link_to "Logout", destroy_user_session_path, method: :delete, :class => 'navbar-link'  %>
  <% else %>
    <%= link_to "Sign up", new_user_registration_path, :class => 'navbar-link'  %> |
    <%= link_to "Login", new_user_session_path, :class => 'navbar-link'  %>
  <% end %>

Finally, force the user to redirect to the login page if the user was not logged in. Open up app/controllers/application_controller.rb and add:

  before_action :authenticate_user!

after protect_from_forgery with: :exception.

Where we are going next:

Thus far we have implemented two models (one for users's and one for posts). We have added authentication and authorization. We have created the routes and the views for all of our actions for the website.

In our next session we will be implementing Bootstrap styling to really give our website a look and feel that is more professional and pleasing.

Resources:

https://github.com/plataformatec/devise http://www.korenlc.com/rails-tutorial-authentication-with-devise/