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larson reever edited this page Sep 11, 2019 · 64 revisions

Restful Authentication Generator

This widely-used plugin provides a foundation for securely managing user
authentication:

  • Login / logout
  • Secure password handling
  • Account activation by validating email
  • Account approval / disabling by admin
  • Rudimentary hooks for authorization and access control.

Several features were updated in May, 2008.

!! important: if you upgrade your site, existing user account !! !! passwords will stop working unless you use —old-passwords !!

Issue Tracker

Please submit any bugs or annoyances on the lighthouse tracker at

For anything simple, please github message both maintainers with a patch, Rick Olson (technoweenie) and Flip Kromer (mrflip).

Documentation

This page has notes on

See the wiki
(or the notes/ directory) if you want to learn more about:

  • Addons — Extensions, add-ons and alternatives such as HAML templates
  • Security Patterns with snazzy diagram
  • Authentication — Lets a visitor identify herself (and lay claim to her corresponding Roles and measure of Trust) – See How to setup Two factor authentication
  • Trustification (Trust Metrics) — Confidence we can rely on the outcomes of this visitor’s actions.
  • Authorization and Policy — Based on trust and identity, what actions may this visitor perform?
  • Access Control — How the Authorization policy is actually enforced in your code (A: hopefully without turning it into a spaghetti of if thens)
  • Rails Plugins for Authentication, Trust, Authorization and Access Control
  • Tradeoffs — for the paranoid or the curious, a rundown of tradeoffs made in the code
  • CHANGELOG — Summary of changes to internals
  • TODO — Ideas for how you can help

These best version of the release notes are in the notes/ directory in the source code — look there for the latest version. The wiki versions are taken (manually) from there.

Exciting new features

Stories

There are now RSpec stories that allow expressive, enjoyable tests for the
authentication code. The flexible code for resource testing in stories was
extended from Ben Mabey’s.

Modularize to match security design patterns:

  • Authentication (currently: password, browser cookie token, HTTP basic)
  • Trust metric (email validation)
  • Authorization (stateful roles)
  • Leave a flexible framework that will play nicely with other access control / policy definition / trust metric plugins

Other

  • Added a few helper methods for linking to user pages
  • Uniform handling of logout, remember_token
  • Stricter email, login field validation
  • Minor security fixes — see CHANGELOG

Non-backwards compatible Changes

Here are a few changes in the May 2008 release that increase “Defense in Depth”
but may require changes to existing accounts

  • If you have an existing site, none of these changes are compelling enough to
    warrant migrating your userbase.
  • If you are generating for a new site, all of these changes are low-impact.
    You should apply them.

Passwords

The new password encryption (using a site key salt and stretching) will break existing user accounts’ passwords. We recommend you use the --old-passwords option or write a migration tool and submit it as a patch. See the Tradeoffs note for more information.

Validations

By default, email and usernames are validated against a somewhat strict pattern; your users’ values may be now illegal. Adjust to suit.

Installation

This is a basic restful authentication generator for rails, taken from acts as authenticated. Currently it requires Rails 1.2.6 or above.

IMPORTANT FOR RAILS > 2.1 USERS (fixed in 2.2) To avoid a NameError exception (lighthouse tracker ticket), check out the code to have an underscore and not dash in its name:

  • either use git clone git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git restful_authentication
  • or rename the plugin’s directory to be restful_authentication after fetching it.

If you’re using git as your source control, be aware that just checking out the repository with the command above will not allow you to include the plugin files in your project. You have two options.

  1. Checkout into vendor/plugins using git clone git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git restful_authentication and delete the .git folder inside the directory. (This will break the connection with the github repository, and allow you to include the code into your project with git add)
  2. Use git submodule. From the top level of your project, add the plugin git submodule add git://github.com/technoweenie/restful-authentication.git vendor/plugins/restful_authentication. This will create a reference link to the repository, which can be save into your project. You will need to let capistrano know that you want to update submodules on deploy via set :git_enable_submodules, 1.

git-submodule docs

To use the generator:

 ./script/generate authenticated user sessions \
    --include-activation \
    --stateful \
    --rspec \
    --skip-migration \
    --skip-routes \
    --old-passwords
  • The first parameter specifies the model that gets created in signup (typically
    a user or account model). A model with migration is created, as well as a
    basic controller with the create method. You probably want to say “User” here.
  • The second parameter specifies the session controller name. This is the
    controller that handles the actual login/logout function on the site.
    (probably: “Session”).
  • --include-activation: Generates the code for a ActionMailer and its respective
    Activation Code through email.
  • --stateful: Builds in support for acts_as_state_machine and generates
    activation code. (--stateful implies --include-activation). Based on the
    idea at http://www.vaporbase.com/postings/stateful_authentication. Passing
    --skip-migration will skip the user migration, and --skip-routes will skip
    resource generation - both useful if you’ve already run this generator.
    (Needs the acts_as_state_machine plugin,
    but new installs should probably run with @    -aasm@ instead.)
  • --aasm: Works the same as stateful but uses the updated aasm gem
    Add
    
  config.gem "rubyist-aasm", :lib => "aasm", :source => "http://gems.github.com"

    to config/environment.rb for use in projects that use rails >=2.1.0
  • --rspec: Generate RSpec tests and Stories in place of standard rails tests.
    This requires the
    RSpec and Rspec-on-rails plugins
    (make sure you “./script/generate rspec” after installing RSpec.) The rspec
    and story suite are much more thorough than the rails tests, and changes are
    unlikely to be backported.
  • --old-passwords: Use the older password scheme (see #COMPATIBILITY, above)
  • --skip-migration: Don’t generate a migration file for this model
  • --skip-routes: Don’t generate a resource line in config/routes.rb

After installing

The below assumes a Model named ‘User’ and a Controller named ‘Session’; please alter to suit. There are additional security minutae in notes/README-Tradeoffs — only the paranoid or the curious need bother, though.

Add named routes and pretty URLs:

Add these familiar login URLs to your config/routes.rb if you like:


map.signup  ‘/signup’, :controller => ‘users’,   :action => ‘new’
map.login  ‘/login’,  :controller => ‘session’, :action => ‘new’
map.logout ‘/logout’, :controller => ‘session’, :action => ‘destroy’

If you used --include-activation, also include a route for the activation URL:


map.activate ‘/activate/:activation_code’,
:controller => ‘users’,
:action => ‘activate’,
:activation_code => nil

Add an observer to generate activation codes

If you generated with --include-activation, --stateful or --aasm, you’ll need to enable an observer to catch record-creation and record-modification events. In config/environment.rb:


config.active_record.observers = :user_observer

Add restful routes for suspend, unsuspend and purge

If you used --stateful or --aasm when generation, you need to ensure that a link to suspend_path and friends will use the correct HTTP POST-like method. Modify the users resource line in config/routes.rb to read:


map.resources :users, :member => { :suspend   => :put,
:unsuspend => :put,
:purge     => :delete }

Activation code does not match?

There have been some reports that the sent activation_code does not match with the one stored in the database. If this is happening to you, two solutions exist for this: Switching from --stateful to --aasm is one that is reported to do the job, and forcing a reload of the user object prior to the email send is another.

You can force a reload something like this:


class UserObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
def after_create(user)
user.reload
UserMailer.deliver_signup_notification(user)
end
def after_save(user)
user.reload
UserMailer.deliver_activation(user) if user.recently_activated?
end
end

IMPORTANT Security Recommendation:

If you use a public repository for your code (such as github, rubyforge, gitorious, etc.) make sure to NOT post your site_keys.rb (add a line like ‘/config/initializers/site_keys.rb’ to your .gitignore or do the svn ignore dance), but make sure you DO keep it backed up somewhere safe and actively track user activity.

Logging in with either username or email

Some people like to allow logging in with email address OR username. If you’re using —stateful or —aasm, see this gist

If you’re not using the stateful option check this gist

Clone this wiki locally