Custom Rails authentication / authorization

Question

I know questions of this kind have been asked before, but my situation differs a little.

On my rails app I have to validate the user login against an existing repository and then control authorization to given modules. So, I don't want the solution I go for to generate a model for my users and rely on that. The authetication per se needs to be customized.

Under that scenario, what would be the best plugin to use?

Answer 1

I don't know whether these will help, but I always use these links for reference apart from RESTful ACL

1) http://clearcove.ca/blog/2008/08/recipe-restful-permissions-for-rails/

2) http://steffenbartsch.com/blog/2008/08/rails-authorization-plugins/ - has a list of stuffs on authentication/authorization plugins

http://metautonomo.us/2008/09/30/easy-role-based-authorization/

Answer 2

Look into restful acl

Answer 3

Here's one secure_sessions, which makes no assumptions about your models. Instead you provide a proc in your environment that is responsible for authentication:

SecureSessions::Password.validate_proc = proc do |ctrl| 
  # define any proc here which validates username/password etc, and returns a unique ID
  return nil unless User.authenticate(ctrl.params[:login], ctrl.params[:password])
  User.find_by_login(ctrl.params[:login]).id
end

Answer 4

Authority

I've just released a gem called Authority which is totally ORM-neutral; you can do whatever Ruby logic works for your app.

The original use case, for example, involved comparing roles described by a single-sign-on system with permissions in a YAML file.