Hartl Rails Tutorial - Seed User Passwords

Question

I'm working my way through the excellent Rails tutorial by Michael Hartl, and I'm trying to wrap my head around an aspect of the seed users. I just finished chapter 9, so I've got a working login/logout/edit/delete system with admin privileges. As part of this chapter, we create some dummy users in the fixtures file:

michael:
  name: Michael Example
  email: [email protected]
  password_digest: <%= User.digest('password') %>
  admin: true

My question is: how do I login as [email protected]? It's not clear to me what the password is. On a related note, what is the best practice for creating a universal "admin" user? Should I use a fixture, or should I add one to the database through the Rails console before deploying the app?

Thanks for your help!

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Edit - here's the link to the BitBucket repository: https://bitbucket.org/jonathan_buck/sample_app/overview

Answer 1

You're generating password digest from string "password"

User.digest('password')

So user's password is "password"

Answer 2

The password is not saved as-is in the database. Instead a digest/secured version of the same is saved. The method #digest takes a parameter and outputs the digest version.

So, technically, the set password is "password". But in the database, you'll find it gibberish.

Makes sense?