MerbAuth

A slice for the Merb framework.

MerbAuth is an authentication framework for the Merb Web Framework.

Currently DataMapper and ActiveRecord supportis available. It should be pretty easy to add your own.

MerbAuth provides your model with a mixin that gives your model all the required behavior and links it to the controllers.

As an example. In your normal applications model directory create your user model.

class User

include MerbAuth::Adapter::DataMapper
include MerbAuth::Adapter::DataMapper::DefaultModelSetup

end

This will give the User class the required behavior and provide access to the class through MerbAuth for other slice authors. To save key presses a handy constant is available MA.

So using the MA constant you can declare your class like this

class Person

include MA::Adapter::DataMapper
include MerbAuth::Adapter::DataMapper::DefaultModelSetup

end

And in your custom slice, get access to the user class with MA

If you don’t want to use the default setup for options. i.e. you want to see the properties in your model, change the validations or whatever, you can just enter them into your model. To find out the required properties and validations that the default uses use the rake task to get a print out that you can paste into your model.

rake slices:merb_auth:dm:setup # Datamapper defaults

rake slices:merb_auth:ar:setup # ActiveRecord defaults

Useful Helpers

The normal merb-auth helpers are available for your application, but also there is some consistent helpers for other slice authors. Most notably is the controller helper

:current_ma_user also aliased as :current_person, or :current_user or whatever your user class name is.

Controllers

The controllers that drive MerbAuth are always named MA::Users, and MA::Sessions

These are then mapped to appropriately named routes.

Options

See notes after installation instructions

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Instructions for installation:

Quick Install

# config/init.rb dependency “merb-slices” dependency “merb-auth”

# router r.add_slice(:MerbAuth, “path/to/mount/at”)

# Boot strap to your app rake slices:merb_auth:install

Long Install INstructions

# add the slice as a regular dependency

dependency ‘merb-auth’

# if needed, configure which slices to load and in which order

Merb::Plugins.config = { :queue => [“MerbAuth”, …] }

Configure Your Router

In config/router.rb you need to activate your brand new MerbAuth Slice. You can do this a number of ways.

The easiest way is like this:

r.add_slices

If you’d like to specify MerbAuth for mounting or other routeing options given in slices

r.add_slice(:MerbAuth)

By default this will mount the slice at /merb-auth. So your login url will be at

/merb-auth/login

If you’d like to specify a different mount point in your application do it like this.

r.add_slice(:MerbAuth, ‘authentcation’)

Your login url will now be /authentication/login, your signup url will be at /authentication/users/new

Alternatively you can just mount merb-auth directly onto your application. (Recommended)

r.add_slice(:MerbAuth, :path => “”, :default_routes => false)

If you’d like to set more options, I suggest you look up the merb-slices documentation.

Install your slice

You need to install the slice.

rake slices:merb_auth:install

Configuring your install.

If you don’t have any configuration applied some simple defaults will be assumed. You configure your installation by writing it to the config/slices.yml file

Login Field

By default merb-auth uses the “email” field to login. If you want to use a different field, even one of your own, you can use the :login_field: jid

option. This example will set the “jid” field to be the default field used for logging in. One thing to bear in mind is that this needs to actually be a field in the database.

Routing options

:route_path_model: first choice for model route path. defaults to “users” (used to make single_model_path and

:route_path_session: first choice for the sessions route path. Defaults to “sessions”

Named routes for the MA::Users resource

:user:

\:new:       # ||= :"new_#{single_model_name}"
\:show:      # ||= :"#{single_model_name}"
\:edit:      # ||= :"edit_#{single_model_name}"
\:delete:    # ||= :"delete_#{single_model_name}"
\:index:     # ||= :"#{plural_model_path}"
\:activate:  # ||= :"#{single_model_name}_activation"

A named route called :login, :logout and :signup are also included.

Including activation emails for account verification

To include activation email to your uses use the

:use_activation: true option

To not use it either leave it out, or set it false like this

:use_activation: false

If this option is turned off, it will just automatically complete the relevant fields to have an activated user. This way, if you decide later that you’d like to include activation then the previously signed up users are already fully active and ready to fit into the new behavior :)

There is also the subjects that you can setup for your emails

:from_email :welcome_subject: # ||= “Welcome” :activation_subject: # ||= “Please Activate Your Account”

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Override the Views

You can override the views MerbAuth provides. Lets face it. They’re pretty basic.

To do this, you need to edit the files in the bootstrapped directories in your application.

Merb.root/slices/merb-auth/app/views/

Example

To change the login form you’d head on over to

Merb.root/slices/merb-auth/app/views/users/new.html.(haml|erb)

And put in your own view there. The same is available for any of the components of merbful authentication

You can also add your own overrides to the controllers similarly.

Using Your own Layout

To setup merbful authentication to use your own layout use a before_app_loads block.

Example

Merb::Slices.config = { :layout => :application }

Migrations

There is a migration task for merb-auth to generate your migrations. Make sure you have use_orm selected so that it knows which generator to use. Then from your host application

rake slices:merb_auth:generate_migration