Hello, I'm... Carmelyne

I'm a web developer with strong information architecture skills & ability to design simple & engaging user interfaces.

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Restful_authentication & Activation

August 21, 2007 by carmelyne (updated: 03/12/08)

Extension of Railscasts Episode 67

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Update: [March 12, 2008] This blog post is outdated so if you found this page using google, I'd recommend reading something more up-to-date. Unfortunately, I don't know where else to refer you right now. I shared my thoughts and experience with the plugin at the time I was using it for a project. Living in the now, you can grab Obie Fernandez's Book " The Rails Way ". That comes highly recommended!

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Ryan showed us how to set up restful_authentication a plugin by Rick Olson with his 67th Railscasts Episode: restful_authentication . Pretty awesome! Now, we will extend it to the activation part.

./script/generate authenticated user sessions --include-activation

With the added --include-activation option, more files and codes will be generated to handle "Activation for a User who just registered".

Shall we break them down in steps... baby steps and with codes. I would be happy to do a screencast for this but I dont own a podcast mic yet so lets do it the old school way. I know we're all spoiled by Ryan's RailsCasts and Geoffrey's PeepCodes . We are the little Brats! :)

After generating the files for restful_authentication, follow the 67th episode set up plus these...

Step 1: All about Environment.rb

Open your environment.rb file and set up the following:

Note: Just a heads up -- if you're on SliceHost like I am, I can't get this to work on just Postfix on Ubuntu. I needed to set up the SMTP settings on the environment.rb file.

Step 2: All about app/models/user_notifier.rb

Now you can see how we set a dryer way to add the HOST via #{HOST}. The codes below is also an example if you've extended it to handle resetting the passwords. Although you will have to add an additional user migration for "password_reset_code" and adding it to your user model/controller codes and more to your routes....

Anyway, code snippets below:

Step 3: All about app/views/user_notifier/activation.rhtml

This gets sent out for the activation email so you can change the verbiage to something like this:

I think that should be it. :)

I wrote this up to give you an idea for activation. If you extended it way beyond for forgot_password/reset_password, make sure you extend your user model and controller to handle these additional functions. More snippets....

Extras

Update

But of course, there's a much better resource for the plugins, I was just referred to it after this long post from the man himself => Rick's Stikipad for Acts As Authenticated and RESTful authentication .

The additional methods for activation/forgot_password/reset_password does not fall under REST.

Tags: Playground, Ruby / Rails, Scripting / Snippets, Thoughts

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Archived Comments

nicolash : according to the api http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html (and Ryan in http://railscasts.com/episodes/61) you are not supposed to use instance-variables for subject and so on but plain variables
@recipients = "#{user.email}"
...
change to:
recipients = "#{user.email}"
...

Posted: September 27th, 2007 at 12:04 PM

nicolash : sorry - to fast to tired
change from: @recipients = "#{user.email}" to recipients "#{user.email}"
(no @ and no =)

Posted: September 27th, 2007 at 12:32 PM

carmelyne : Thanks Nicolash, I will look into it. Beast still uses instance variables too http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/beast/tags/rel-1.0/app/models/user_mailer.rb
What's the exact reason why we can't use instance variables?

Posted: September 27th, 2007 at 09:21 PM

nicolash : it is not that you can't use instance variables but setting the variables via the configuration methods seems to be "the prefered way to do it". And Beast - they just use the plug without checking it. I do the same usually ;-).
The "Why": This should be answered by someone more advanced then me, but it remembers me foe example of going from @params to params. Seems to be a tendency to abstract away the setting of variables via methods - maybe to allow rails to change things in the future without breaking stuff, 'cause if you go via methods rails has a hook to tweak your settings - but as i said this is just an educated(?) guess and I would appreciate if some one else answers the "Why".

Posted: September 28th, 2007 at 01:51 AM