How to create password protected RSS feed in rails

Question

Creating RSS feed in rails is easy. I need a simple way to password protect the RSS feed. I am thinking http basic authentication.

I googled but could not find any article about creating password protected RSS.

Answer 1

I have this in my ApplicationController

def xml_authorize
  if request.format == Mime::XML
    authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |username, password|
      username == 'foo' && password == 'bar'
    end
  end
end

Then I just apply a before_filter :xml_authorize to the actions that I want to password protect for XML requests only, but still want to serve normally with html.

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Here's where I got the inspiration from.