Ruby on Rails

The Dailycred ruby gem is everything you need to get off the ground running with robust authentication. It includes an omniauth provider and a generator to create necessary models and controllers. The generated authentication structure is inspired by nifty-generators.

If you are using a rails project that already has authentication, check out this post about integrating Dailycred with an existing rails project.

If you'd rather only communicate with Dailycred through OAuth and provide your own authentication controllers and models, you can use the omniauth_dailycred gem.

Installation

To get started using Dailycred with Ruby on Rails, the first thing you need to do is add the dailycred gem to your gemfile:

gem 'dailycred'

Make sure you've signed up for Dailycred, and head over to your settings page to get your API keys. Once you've done that, head back to the command line and run:

bundle
rails g dailycred:install
rake db:migrate

Thats it! You've successfully added authentication to your app, and you can start signing up users. Run rails s to start your server, and point your browser to http://localhost:3000/auth and you'll see a pre-built page with links to sign up.

Here's what the dailycred gem generates for you:

  • A few helper methods to /app/controllers/application_controller.rb.
  • An initializer file at /config/initializers/omniauth.rb which configures your dailycred API keys.
  • /app/models/user.rb, the User model.
  • A migration file to create the user table in your database.

While this is enough to get off the ground running with user authentication, this setup is meant to be lightweight and flexible, so feel free to tinker with any of the generated code to better match your needs.

Authenticating

login_path

A helper for linking to the authentication url.

<%= link_to 'sign up', login_path %>
# => <a href="/auth/dailycred">sign up</a>

logout_path

To logout a user, simply send them to /auth/logout.

<%= link_to 'logout', logout_path %>
# => <a href="/auth/logout">logout</a>

authenticate

To protect a controller method from unauthorized users, use the 'authorize' helper method as a before_filter.

#before_filter :authenticate, :except => [:index] #don't authenticate some
#before_filter :authenticate, :only => [:create, :new] #only authenticate some
before_filter :authenticate #all methods

Social Connect

To use a social sign-in service instead of email, and password, use connect_path.

<%= link_to 'sign in with facebook', connect_path(:identity_provider => :facebook) %>

The identity_provider can be one of facebook, google, twitter, disqus, or instagram.

After a user has social connected, their social data is serialized into individual fields in the user model. The serialized object is the exact same as what the social provider's graph response returns. For example:

p current_user.facebook
# =>
{
    "video_upload_limits" => {
        "length" => 1200.0,
        "size" => 1073741824.0
    },
    "locale" => "en_US",
    "link" => "http://www.facebook.com/joe.smith",
    "updated_time" => "2012-09-27T19:04:38+0000",
    "currency" => {
        "user_currency" => "USD",
        "currency_exchange" => 10.0,
        "currency_exchange_inverse" => 0.1,
        "currency_offset" => 100.0
    },
    "picture" => {
        "data" => {
            "url" => "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash4/370570_1039690812_2022945351_q.jpg",
            "is_silhouette" => false
        }
    },
    "id" => "1092609812",
    "third_party_id" => "cBLDKnqlfYlReV7Jo4yRAFB1a4I",
    "first_name" => "Joe",
    "username" => "jsmitty",
    "bio" => "shred the gnar.",
    "email" => "[email protected]",
    "verified" => true,
    "name" => "Joe Smith",
    "last_name" => "Stoever",
    "gender" => "male",
    "access_token" =>"AAAFHsZAi9ddUBAKPMOKPDrmJlclwCoVHCfwflF5ZCyLZC70SOo0MPvj62lhHZAnV6jk8DEfBSjLtfcyC7Bx25a9CLphzoayv3EtvbE2tAQZDZD"
}

You can also connect additional social accounts to an existing user:

<%= link_to 'connect with facebook', connect_user(:facebook) %>

connect_user defaults to connecting the current_user, but you can explicitly connect any user:

<%= link_to 'connect with google', connect_user(:google, @user) %>

Helpers

There are a few other helper methods available:

current_user

Returns the current logged in user or nil. Example usage:

if !current_user.nil?
  redirect_to :controller => 'welcome', :action => 'thanks'
end

dailycred

A helper for instantiating a dailycred client instance. Use as a before_filter to load a @dailycred instance variable, or just use it as a helper method. Example usage:

As a before filter:

before_filter :dailycred

def index
    @dailycred.event(current_user.uid, "New Task", @task.name)
end

or just as a helper

def index
    dailycred.event(current_user.uid, "New Task", @task.name)
end

Tagging a User

Dailycred provides the ability to 'tag' users, whether for reference in analytics or any other reason. Note that this is a very simple 'tagging' system, and not something you should use for dynamic tagging situations in your application.

@user.tag 'awesome'
@user.untag 'awesome'

Firing Events

You can also fire events tied to a specific user - this is helpful for goal tracking and tying actions to a specific user in analytics. We already fire many events for when a user signs up, resets a password, and much more, but you can also use the event system for something more specific for your application.

# user#fire_event(key, value)
@user.fire_event 'task added', @task.name

Building Referral URLs

To easily build referral URLs to track sharing amongst your users, use referral_link(my_site), where my_site is the url that you wish referred users to be sent to.

current_user.referral_link("http://www.mysite.com")

Testing Controllers

Testing controllers that have the authenticate before filter is easy:

# with mocha
@controller.stubs(:current_user).returns(@user)

See dummy/test/functional/post_controller_test.rb for an example.

Dailycred API

For reference, have a look at the annotated source code.

For all API calls, you must first initalize a Dailycred client:

@dailycred = Dailycred.new "YOUR_CLIENT_ID", "your_secret_key", opts

Where opts is an optional hash for passing options. After initializing your client, you can create events as well as tag and untag users:

@dailycred.event(current_user.uid, "New Task", @task.name) # user_id, key, value
@dailycred.tag(current_user.uid, "Failed Checkout") # user_id, key
@dailycred.untag(current_user.uid, "Failed Checkout") # user_id, key

Persona Login

  1. Set your persona audience in your dailycred identity provider settings. This will be http://{your-url}/auth/dailycred/callback.
  2. Make sure you have configured your callback url in your dailycred app settings

  3. In config/omniauth.rb, configure your middleware options to include your persona audience:

    Rails.configuration.DAILYCRED_OPTIONS = { middleware: { persona_audience = "http://your-url/auth/dailycred/callback" } }

  4. In your javascript, call personaLogin().

    $(document).ready(function(){ $('.persona-login').click(function(){ personaLogin(); }) })

  5. Your user will be redirected to your persona.org to login. If successful, your user will be redirected to your OAuth callback URL and be logged in.

For more details, visit our persona documentation

Configuration

To specify where users should be redirected after authentication actions, setup configure an after_auth property on a Rails.configuration.DAILYCRED_OPTIONS variable. Example:

# configure where users should be redirected after authentication
#
# Rails.configuration.DAILYCRED_OPTIONS = {
#   :after_auth => '/hello', #after login
#   :after_unauth => '/goodbye' #after logout
# }

Customization

If you would like to customize this engine's controllers or views, two generators are provided for you.

rails g dailycred:controllers
rails g dailycred:views

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