Monkey Patch Rails Core Concerns

Question

I've bumped into a dead-end with the SecurePassword model of ActiveModel doing bcrypt only. (I need to store the passwords with a different but equally secure hash in order to export and use the hashed passwords for Dovecot IMAP auth.)

This may be a useful feature for everybody, so I'll work it into a patch eventually. But right now, I'd like to monkey patch the SecurePassword module. However, I'm not sure how to tackle this in such a way to make sure the concern is monkey patched before it's included anywhere else.

Thanks for your hints!

Answer 1

The easiest way to get started, in my experience (with Rails 3.2 at least, can't say for earlier versions since the last time I used Rails was in 2.x days) is to just save your code into a file such as secure_password.rb under config/initializers.

In config/initializers/secure_password.rb, you can almost get away with anything, but in your case you probably want to go:

module ActiveModel
  module SecurePassword
    module InstanceMethodsOnActivation
      def authenticate(unencrypted_password)
        # Replace calls to BCrypt here
      end

      def password=(unencrypted_password)
        # and here
      end
    end
  end
end

See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html for more on Rails initialization and configuration.

(Untested, but I've monkey-patched ActiveRecord::Timestamp just like that and it all just works.)