Best Solution For Authentication in Ruby on Rails [closed]

Answer 1

I would really recommend Restful Authentication. I think it's pretty much the de-facto standard.

Answer 2

restful_authentication is a powerful tool which is very flexible and provides most of what you are looking for out of the box. However, a couple of caveats:

1. Don't think in terms of 'controls'. In Rails the Model, View and Controller are much more independent than in 'Webforms-style' ASP.NET. Work out what you want from each layer independently, write tests/specs to match and make sure each layer is doing what you expect.
2. Even if you are using a plugin there is no substitute for reading (at least some) of the code generated. If you have a big-picture idea of what is going on under the hood, you will find debugging and customising much easier.

Answer 3

Another vote for Clearance - perhaps not as customisable or as 'in' as authlogic, but in terms of just being able to drop it in place and go, it's definitely worth having a look at.

Answer 4

For a really simple solution go with Clearance.

If you are looking for more options Devise is a great solution. It uses Warden which is a rack based authentication system.

Answer 5

I'd also like to point out an excellent tutorial/discussion on extending the core functionality of Restful Authentication, in case you're looking for something a bit more robust.

Answer 6

AuthLogic seems to be what you want for this. It's very configurable, and although it doesn't generate the code for you, it's quite easy to use. For email validation and password recovery you probably want to use the :perishable_token column. AuthLogic takes care of it, you only need to reset it when it's used. For information on how to set up a basic app, you can take a look at Ryan Bates' Railscast on AuthLogic, and the "official" example app. Ben Johnson, the creator of AuthLogic has also written a blog post on how to RESTfully reset passwords.

Unfortunately I can't post more than one link, but the links to the railscast, the password reset blog post and the example app are all in the README (see the AuthLogic repo for the README)

Update: Now I can post more links, so I linked some more. Thank you marinatime for adding the link in the meanwhile