Comments on: Rails Help, Please? (How to create a login/account system)

By: Richard Henry

Richard Henry — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:02:32 +0000

Do you mind if I pose a question for you Jens… is The Rails Way worth using? What’s your experience with the rest of it? I’m hunting for a decent Rails book, something that would help a guy interesting in moving from PHP, but a total Rails n00b…

By: Jens Alfke

Jens Alfke — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:49:15 +0000

Thanks a lot, everyone! It’s nice to see such unanimity … makes it easy for me to figure out what to do.

Special thanks to Ivar for the link to the great tutorial. There’s a lot of stuff to paste in, but I’m nearly done. (Someone should really package up that entire tutorial as a plugin, shouldn’t they?)

By: shanec

shanec — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:24:06 +0000

Railscasts.com has some great tutorials on restful authentication and OpenID authentication.

By: Milan Iliev

Milan Iliev — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:32:46 +0000

I recently implemented an authorization system using restful-authentication in Rails 2.0.2 in about six hours. +1.

By: Ivar Vasara

Ivar Vasara — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:22:14 +0000

Hereis a great step-by-step tutorial on integrating restful authentication and openID.

By: Ryan E

Ryan E — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:15:04 +0000

I think you’re going to see a unanimous verdict here: restful-authentication. Not too long ago I started a new Rails project on 2.0.1 (I think) and restful-authentication worked great. I’m probably also going to be retrofitting it onto a project that was started in Rails 1.2.x and upgraded to 2.0.2.

By: Brian Deterling

Brian Deterling — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:48:56 +0000

I’m relatively new to Rails and I hit the same issue you did and ended up using restful-authentication as the previous commenter suggested. I didn’t have any problems with it.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:48:42 +0000

I second using restful-authentication, although I have heard complains that it doesn’t really do the new sexy migrations and doesn’t really work to well with 2.0.2… Haven’t really tested myself yet though so I can’t say that for sure! You could also write something from scratch, although reinventing the wheel doesn’t always make a lot of sense.

By: toto

toto — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:29:35 +0000

For authentication you would want to use the successor of acts_as_authenticted:
restful-authentication (http://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication/tree/master).

Because most Rails apps are using REST they went to restful-authentication. You should, by all means, not use the acts_as_authenticated plugin, because it contains a security bug, that allows unauthorized access.