# UserEngine deployment pain: can't login

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/userengine-deployment-pain-cant-login/82936>\
**Category:** Engines\
**Created:** [March 17, 2006, 12:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/userengine-deployment-pain-cant-login/82936 "2006-03-17T00:34:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hatless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/848f3c/32.png) [@hatless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hatless)\
**Post date:** [March 17, 2006, 12:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/userengine-deployment-pain-cant-login/82936/1 "2006-03-17T00:34:26Z")

</div>

All right, after a full day of troubleshooting, I’ll restate my problem:

1. On my dev machine, my application works perfectly with the  
LoginEngine/UserEngine combo.

2. On the production box, where prior builds of my app worked before  
installing the engines, I am stuck at the login page. I stop Apache,  
kill my fcgis, delete the session files in /tmp, restart apache, and  
it’s the same thing. Login page.

3. I have dropped all the engine-related tables three or four times now,  
re-run rake engine\_migrate and boostrap each time, and the tables all  
look correct. There is an admin user with the email address I specified  
in environment.rb. The roles and permissions and the join tables all  
look properly populated.

4. I have given up for now on setting my before\_action on a  
per-controller basis even though it worked berfectly on the dev box. I  
got rid of all of those directives and the mixins in  
RAILS\_ROOT/app/controllers and instead put the single :authorize\_action  
after the engine includes in application.rb.

5. I have checked, double-checked and triple-checked the includes in  
application.rb and application\_helper.rb.

After all this, my dev machine works exactly as expected: all actions  
require a user to be logged in and if it’s not the admin, they need  
assigned permissions. All of this works, including the admin user’s  
ability to work with roles and user permissions.

On the production machine, I simply attempt to access /user/list… which  
correctly redirects me to /user/login… and I’m stuck. I cannot log in.

Clicking the signup or forgot-password links crap out with the familiar  
nil-user error:

NoMethodError in User#forgot\_password

Showing vendor/plugins/login\_engine/app/views/user/forgot\_password.rhtml  
where line #4 raised:

undefined method `errors’ for nil:NilClass

Extracted source (around line #4):

1:

  
2: 
### Forgotten Password
  
3:  
4: \<%= error\_messages\_for ‘user’ %\>  
5:  
6: 
  
7: 

Enter your email address in the field below and click ‘Reset  
Password’ to have instructions on how to retrieve your forgotten  
password emailed to you.

Now what?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hatless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/848f3c/32.png) [@hatless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hatless)\
**Post date:** [March 17, 2006, 1:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/userengine-deployment-pain-cant-login/82936/2 "2006-03-17T01:40:44Z")

</div>

SOLVED!

Still don’t know why it was working all along on one environment and not  
the other, but I got completely rid of my overloading user\_ and role\_  
controllers and now it seems to be working. So instead of applying  
before\_filters on an as-needed basis, I’m going to apply it globally in  
application.rb and disable it–or grant guest privs, I suppose–as  
necessary.

Ugh.

Steve K. wrote:

> All right, after a full day of troubleshooting, I’ll restate my problem:
> 
> 1. On my dev machine, my application works perfectly with the  
> LoginEngine/UserEngine combo.
> 
> 2. On the production box, where prior builds of my app worked before  
> installing the engines, I am stuck at the login page. I stop Apache,  
> kill my fcgis, delete the session files in /tmp, restart apache, and  
> it’s the same thing. Login page.
> 
> 3. I have dropped all the engine-related tables three or four times now,  
> re-run rake engine\_migrate and boostrap each time, and the tables all  
> look correct. There is an admin user with the email address I specified  
> in environment.rb. The roles and permissions and the join tables all  
> look properly populated.
> 
> 4. I have given up for now on setting my before\_action on a  
> per-controller basis even though it worked berfectly on the dev box. I  
> got rid of all of those directives and the mixins in  
> RAILS\_ROOT/app/controllers and instead put the single :authorize\_action  
> after the engine includes in application.rb.
> 
> 5. I have checked, double-checked and triple-checked the includes in  
> application.rb and application\_helper.rb.
> 
> After all this, my dev machine works exactly as expected: all actions  
> require a user to be logged in and if it’s not the admin, they need  
> assigned permissions. All of this works, including the admin user’s  
> ability to work with roles and user permissions.
> 
> On the production machine, I simply attempt to access /user/list… which  
> correctly redirects me to /user/login… and I’m stuck. I cannot log in.
> 
> Clicking the signup or forgot-password links crap out with the familiar  
> nil-user error:
> 
> NoMethodError in User#forgot\_password
> 
> Showing vendor/plugins/login\_engine/app/views/user/forgot\_password.rhtml  
> where line #4 raised:
> 
> undefined method `errors’ for nil:NilClass
> 
> Extracted source (around line #4):
> 
> 1:
> 
>   
> 2: 
> ### Forgotten Password
>   
> 3:  
> 4: \<%= error\_messages\_for ‘user’ %\>  
> 5:  
> 6: 
>   
> 7: 
> 
> Enter your email address in the field below and click ‘Reset  
> Password’ to have instructions on how to retrieve your forgotten  
> password emailed to you.
> 
> Now what?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hatless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/848f3c/32.png) [@hatless](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hatless)\
**Post date:** [June 14, 2006, 5:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/userengine-deployment-pain-cant-login/82936/3 "2006-06-14T17:39:47Z")

</div>

I’m having a similar problem, but I don’t think your solution works for  
me because I haven’t overloaded any controllers.

Here are the specifics of my situation.

Everything works fine on development with webrick. When I deploy to  
Apache 1.3 + mod\_fcgi, I cannot login. Even after entering my login  
information, my screen returns to the login page.

I’ve added some privileges for some controllers to the Guest role (so  
that I don’t have to login) and I can execute that code. That tells me  
that the routine to check if Guest can do something still works. For  
some unknown reason, I cannot change my status to ‘logged in’.

I’ve set the file system privileges to the tmp directory so that anyone  
can write there. I’ve cleared out all session files, and have seen new  
session files appear, so I don’t believe that there is a problem with  
session management.

I thought that maybe because my deployment uses a symlink to add the  
Rails app to an existing web site, the routes.rb file needed to be  
modified. However, adding the directory to the mapping makes Rails  
submit to the wrong controller/action. So, I’m at a loss.

Can you offer any advice?

Thanks,

-Anthony

Steve K. wrote:

> SOLVED!
> 
> Still don’t know why it was working all along on one environment and not  
> the other, but I got completely rid of my overloading user\_ and role\_  
> controllers and now it seems to be working. So instead of applying  
> before\_filters on an as-needed basis, I’m going to apply it globally in  
> application.rb and disable it–or grant guest privs, I suppose–as  
> necessary.
> 
> Ugh.