Protected sharing link in Ruby on Rails [closed]

Answer 1

I don't know of any gems for protected links and I can imagine that it is hard to find a common denominator for such an individual feature.

However, here's how I would implement such a system. The basic idea is to substitute the id with a practically "unguessable" token.

1 - create an token column (index: true, unique: true) for the resource you want to protect

2 - In the model, add validations, generator, callback and override to_param

validates :token, presence: true
validates :token, uniqueness: true

before_validation :generate_token, on: :create

def generate_token
  begin
    self.token = SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64(64, false)
  end while self.class.find_by(token: token)
end

def to_param
  token
end

3 - Change the routes to use :token as url parameter

resources :things, param: :token

4 - Change the controller to find by token instead of id

@thing = Thing.find(params[:id])              # change this
@thing = Thing.find_by(token: params[:token]) # to this

Now, thing_url(@thing) will return a url you can safely share:

http://example.com/things/KSwdmTuDSVOGLTHtjK-RU78x7Bme_g-noTrNcovrtXioxPletLvNK35ia_F8CpIBtNDv-_xQ5bZ8uuv18msD4w

Of course, you need to replace thing and Thing with your model name, respectively.