Authlogic example

My own authlogic playground, with Rails 3 info from this post, plus bits of other functionality/explanation.

Add authlogic and its generators to our Gemfile

gem 'authlogic'
gem 'rails3-generators'

Run bundle install as usual.

Create an authlogic session

rails g authlogic:session UserSession --fixture=false

This creates an empty UserSession model that derives from Authlogic::Session::Base. We add the --fixture=false to prevent the creation of a user_sessions.yml fixture file. If the file is created, when tests are run, Rails will try to delete the data from a non-exstent user_sessions table, causing test failure.

Authlogic user sessions look like ActiveRecord models, but aren't--they're not backed by a table. They're an AR-like mapping of a user's sessions.

Create (or update) a user model

We'll assume our user model is named User (creative!). If we already have one, we can add a bunch of fields to it via a migration, otherwise we'll create a new one.

Required fields

t.string :login,             :null => false
t.string :email,             :null => false
t.string :crypted_password,  :null => false
t.string :password_salt,     :null => false
t.string :persistence_token, :null => false

There are a number of optional fields. See the user migration file or read the actual docs for further info.

Make our user model authentic

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_authentic
end

Configure authlogic

Pass a block to acts_as_authentic to configure authlogic parameters. For example, during testing, I disabled password confirmation to make things easier.

acts_as_authentic do |c|
  c.require_password_confirmation = false
end

Routes and controllers and views, oh my!

More discussion of the code below lives at the link at the top of the readme; I copied it largely verbatim.

• routes (login, logout, home page)
• application controller (helpers)
• session controller (login, logout)
• home controller (index page, before_filter to require login)
• session views (Login form)

Create a user

We'll use rails console to create our first user. (Note There's also a user in the seeds.rb file.)

pry(main)> User.create(:login => 'login1', :password => 'login1', :email => '[email protected]').save!

By default, authlogic requires an email address, and validates the password length.

Configure the validations in the acts_as_authentic block as detailed above. The docs list the defaults, but we can also spelunk using Pry and see for ourselves.

pry(main)> cd User
pry(#<Class:0x1041dcc20>):1> validates_length_of_password_field_options
=> {:minimum=>4, :if=>:require_password?}
pry(#<Class:0x1041dcc20>):1> validates_format_of_email_field_options
=> {:with=>/^[A-Z0-9_\.%\+\-']+@(?:[A-Z0-9\-]+\.)+(?:[A-Z]{2,4}|museum|travel)$/i, :message=>"should look like an email address."}
pry(#<Class:0x1041dcc20>):1> validates_length_of_email_field_options
=> {:maximum=>100}

The length validations accepts the usual length validation hash options.