Users generator?

Rails
1

I was just writing a User model for possibly the fourth time since I
picked up Rails last week (I’ve been going through tons of examples),
which seems to violate the DRY principle. I was wondering if Rails had
any basic User generator somewhere, or one in the pipelines, or a
plugin?

Obviously different apps write User for different things, but this
generator could just be slightly more advanced scaffolding, with
methods provided for salts, signup, login, etc.

Or maybe I’m still just too inexperienced to really know?

2

There is plugin that is generating pretty standard model and
controller for handling login/logout of users.

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/restful_authentication

I do not use it personally, but it’s good to look at code it
generates.

3

I’m still fairly a noob to rails myself. I’m more used to PHP, Java,
and C++ mostly. It definitely does throw you through a loop a few
times.

Anyhow, to clarify, if you are asking if there is an extension or
plugin that will generate actual user accounts for you, that isn’t
going to happen unfortunately. If you are working on writing some sort
of login or authentication system, my suggestion is either manually
create your model and controller, or do it via scaffolding.

So lets say you were creating a rails app called login. So then you
have to decide how you want the authentication to take place. A very
simple method is reading values from an xml file or other text.
However as we all know, that is unsecure and bad practice all the way
around. So logically, lets just use a database to save your users.

For this example, we’ll use mysql. So lets crap the imaginary app.

prompt>rails -d mysql login

Ok, now that is created, we’ll want to create our database. Since the
default naming convention in the /app/config/database.yml file is
appname_development, we want to call it login_development. So we’ll
type:

prompt>mysqladmin -u root create login_development.

Now lets go into our directory
prompt>cd login

Now, the easiest way to generate everything all at once is
scaffolding. To go about this, you’ll type:
prompt>script/generate scaffold users /

username:string password:string first_name:string last_name:string

From there you’ll type:
prompt>rake db:migrate

So your table on the login_development database has been created with
the fields/columns username, password, first_name, and last_name all
with string or as mysql calls it VARCHAR data type.

And from there, you would beging setting up your back-end
functionality and user interface.

And that’s about it. Its fairly simple with rails. Hope this helps to
get you started at least. Let know if if you have any questions.