Ruby-on-rails – OpenID support for Ruby on Rails application

openidruby-on-rails

What is current state of the art for enabling OpenID login in Ruby on Rails applications? This is a community wiki with up-to-date answers to this question.

Authlogic

The most advanced authentication solution seems to be Authlogic. It supports OpenID with Authlogic OpenID plugin. It supports Rails 4 and 3. Rails 2 is supported in the rails2 branch.

You may want to watch "OpenID with Authlogic" railscast (and the "Authlogic" railscast).

There is a sample application called Authlogic OpenID Selector Example.

Devise

Devise is flexible authentication framework for Rails. It supports OpenID with devise_openid_authenticatable.

restful_authentication

Another authentication library of choice is restful_authentication Rails plugin. Seems like you also need to install open_id_authentication plugin.

You may want to watch (old, circa 2007) "OpenID Authentication" railscast.

Ruby OpenID

Raw support for OpenID protocol is handled by Ruby OpenID library.

Best Answer

Check out this Railscast on OpenId for more info. I'm not sure if/how it might work alongside restful_authentication, but might be a good resource. (I haven't watched it yet)

Related Solutions

Ruby-OpenID: Requiring email-address from OpenID provider

As nobody could help me, I helped myself. :-)

The short answer to my question is:

c.required_fields = [:email,"http://axschema.org/contact/email"]

Using this line, the application requests the email-address using sreg and ax (request-type supported by Google).

You can find a more detailed answer and a working implementation of authlogic-openid with the Javascript OpenID-Selector right here:

http://github.com/vazqujav/authlogic_openid_selector_example/

Ruby-on-rails – How to understand nil vs. empty vs. blank in Ruby

.nil? can be used on any object and is true if the object is nil.

.empty? can be used on strings, arrays and hashes and returns true if:

String length == 0
Array length == 0
Hash length == 0

Running .empty? on something that is nil will throw a NoMethodError.

That is where .blank? comes in. It is implemented by Rails and will operate on any object as well as work like .empty? on strings, arrays and hashes.

nil.blank? == true
false.blank? == true
[].blank? == true
{}.blank? == true
"".blank? == true
5.blank? == false
0.blank? == false

.blank? also evaluates true on strings which are non-empty but contain only whitespace:

"  ".blank? == true
"  ".empty? == false

Rails also provides .present?, which returns the negation of .blank?.

Array gotcha: blank? will return false even if all elements of an array are blank. To determine blankness in this case, use all? with blank?, for example:

[ nil, '' ].blank? == false
[ nil, '' ].all? &:blank? == true