Authentication from scratch

Rails
1

Could you please recommend tutorials on developing one’s own
authentication mechanisms, without the use of industrial-strength
plugins?

Is this tutorial from 2006 obsolete?

http://www.aidanf.net/rails_user_authentication_tutorial

I spent several person-days trying to install and use
restful_authentication, but it was mostly a frustrating, labor-intensive
exercise in futility. [1, 2] I then found this prescient article by
David Heinemeier H. from 2005:

I don’t share his philosophical issues with pluggable engines, but in
practice, he seems to have been spot on. Impressive!

[1] The current issues are FixtureClassNotFound errors in the
out-of-the-box unit tests on Debian; I’ve tried Ruby 1.87 and 1.9.1,
each with two variations of restful-authentication:

http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/
GitHub - technoweenie/restful-authentication: inactive project

(Why are those different, anyway?) FWIW, after some minor bug-fixing,
the plugin works fine on Mac OS X.

[2] I’ve also had headaches with git, which has a steep learning curve,
no matter how vehemently Linus decrees otherwise.

2

Just for the record I installed and setup restful_authentication with no
problems.

Persevere with git. It seems strange at first if you have been used to
svn
but after a while you will wonder how you managed without it.
Particularly
if you use it on your own projects.

Colin

2009/4/3 Jeff S. [email protected]

3

On Apr 3, 9:36 am, Jeff S. [email protected] wrote:

Could you please recommend tutorials on developing one’s own
authentication mechanisms, without the use of industrial-strength plugins?

Sure thing:

Cheers,
Mark T.

4

On Apr 3, 12:36 pm, Jeff S. [email protected] wrote:

I spent several person-days trying to install and use
restful_authentication, but it was mostly a frustrating, labor-intensive
exercise in futility

The current issues areFixtureClassNotFounderrors in the
out-of-the-box unit tests

This issue went away when I tried

script/generate authenticated user sessions

rather than

script/generate authenticated users sessions

The plugin itself does not seem to have any problem with the plural
“users”, but the tests die (error, not failure) with unintuitive
output.