how to build a openid provider with ruby on rails

Question

I tried a few searches about openid utilization in ruby on rails. However, although there appears a set of options, such as omniauth, authlogic, and so on, those gems are normally used for building a site which accepts openid authentication. In other words, they are for openid consumer setup.

I want to build my very own openid server as well. As suggested here in OpenId site I found something like Masquerade and local-openid, unfortunately, they are not very active projects with very few downloads.

Is there any other facilities to be recommended for building a self-owned openid provider server?

Thanks a lot !!

Cheers,

Ye

Answer 1

Although I didn't try any Ruby or Rails based OpenID provider software for some years I think you should give masquerade another try. To me it seems there is at least a bit activity there and at least they seemed to have made the jump to Rails 3.x.x already (which is already more than some very popular Rails based free software projects have to offer. I'm looking at you, Redmine).

Additionally the main author of masquerade seems to be currently working on a successor project named masq which seems to be intended as a mountable engine OpenID provider. With this finished, you could easily enhance any existing Rails >= 3.1.0 application to act as an OpenID provider. I have no idea how stable this project is already, though.