Wristband plugin

Author: The Working Group, Inc
Version: 1.0.0

The Wristband plug-in simplifies the user authentication process necessary in most web applications.

It handles:

Login and logout
Password storage with encryption
Remember me functionality
Authority definitions

Usage

From a clean project (assuming you just did rails myproject )

1. Install the plugin

cd vendor/plugins
svn export http://twg.unfuddle.com/svn/twg_twgplugins/wristband/trunk wristband

2. Run the wristband generator:

script/generate wristband

This will output something like:

exists  app/models
create  app/models/user.rb
create  app/controllers/users_controller.rb
create  app/views/users/index.html.haml
exists  app/controllers
create  app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb
create  app/views/sessions/new.html.haml
exists  db/migrate
exists  db/migrate
create  db/migrate/001_wristband.rb
route  specific routes
route  map.resources :sessions, :users

3. Run migrations

rake db:migrate

4. Restart your server

5. Add whatever validations you need in your User model

6. Read the documentation on each one of the generated files

Configuration

User model

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  wristband [options]
end

Options:

:login_with: Array of fields you want to authenticate the user with. Default: usename

wristband :login_with => [:username, :email]

:before_authentication: Array of functions run after the user authentication takes place. Default: []

wristband :before_authentication => :do_something

:after_authentication: Array of functions run before the user authentication takes place. Default: []

wristband :after_authentication => :do_something

:plain_text_password: If true the password won’t be encrypted. Default: false

wristband :plain_text_password => true

:has_authorities: If true the password won’t be encrypted. Default: false

wristband :plain_text_password => true

Remarks:

While password_crypt is limited to 40 characters, the standard output of the hashing function used to encrypt it, there is no such limit on the length of the password as input by the user.
There are no default restrictions on the content of the username. These should be added as required.
A user’s password is stored encrypted by default but support for plain- text passwords is also provided. Leaving ‘password_salt’ as blank or nil means the password is not encrypted. This makes the content of user

fixtures easy to read and understand.

The ‘remember_token’ field is used for login authentication via persistent cookie. This value changes each time the user’s password is reassigned.

Functionality

1. Remember me

If you want to automatically login a user when he comes back to your site, add before_filter :login_from_cookie to your AplicationController.

2. Authority Definitions

Check the documentation on the files/lib/authority_check_rb.html file

Database configuration

The generator gives you a head start. The basic columns are defined as such:

create_table :users do |t|
  t.string :email
  t.string :password_crypt, :limit => 40
  t.string :password_salt,  :limit => 40
  t.string :remember_token
  t.string :email_validation_key
  t.string :role
  t.datetime :created_at
  t.datetime :updated_at
  # Add your own stuff here ...
end