Ruby on rails authentication guide

Question

Does anyone know of a good guide on building your own authentication system in ruby on rails? I want to roll my own system to use with my community im building :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'd recommend starting with Warden - it'll handle the very basics of sessions for you, and give you a good foundation to build your logic on top of. The Rails Warden plugin is a rather small library that helps integrate it into Rails. Both of these projects are fairly mature and well-constructed yet still under active development - they're good choices all around.

You should be aware of Devise, another authentication framework (like Authlogic or Restful Authentication) that is based on Warden. It may not be a good fit for your project (it wasn't for mine), but looking through the source might give you a few ideas on how best to use Warden.

The other thing I'll note is that, in terms of hashing passwords, you should absolutely use bcrypt.