Project: Authentication

Introduction

In these projects, you’ll be working to implement authentication systems so users can only access areas of a site they are authorized to.

Warm Up: Building a Twitter Clone

In this project you’ll follow along to Andy Leverenz’s brilliant Building a Twitter Clone screen casts. You’ll be building a light weight version of Twitter and get lot of healthy experience with using Devise in the process.

Your Task

Complete A Twitter Clone Lets Build with Ruby on Rails Part 1
Complete A Twitter Clone Lets Build with Ruby on Rails Part 2
Complete A Twitter Clone Lets Build with Ruby on Rails Part 3

Project: Members Only!

In this project, you’ll be building an exclusive clubhouse where your members can write embarrassing posts about non-members. Inside the clubhouse, members can see who the author of a post is but, outside, they can only see the story and wonder who wrote it.

If you want to add your own stylistic flourishes, consider it extra credit.

Your Task

The projects will be less and less explicit about how to achieve their goals, since we expect you to build on your previous knowledge. If you don’t know how to do something, feel free to check back in previous lessons or projects or Google the correct way to implement it (though be careful, because that may take you deeper down the road than we intended).

If you’d like to challenge yourself, don’t even follow the steps below, just go ahead and build the app!

Basic Setup

Think about and spec out how to set up your data models for this application. You’ll need users with the usual simple identification attributes like name and email and password but also some sort of indicator of their member status. They’ll need to create posts as well.
Create your new members-only Rails app and GitHub repo. Update your README.
Add devise to your Gemfile and install it in your app using set up instructions on the devise README

Authentication and Posts

Let’s build those secrets! We’ll need to make sure only signed in users can see the author of each post. We’re not going to worry about editing or deleting posts.

Create a Post model and a Posts controller and a corresponding resource in your Routes file which allows the [:new, :create, :index] methods.
Atop your Posts Controller, use a #before_action to restrict access to the #new and #create methods to only users who are signed in. Create the necessary helper methods in your ApplicationController.
For your Posts Controller, prepare your #new action.
Write a very simple form in the app/views/posts/new.html.erb view which will create a new Post.
Make your corresponding #create action build a post where the foreign key for the author (e.g. user_id) is automatically populated based on whichever user is signed in. Redirect to the Index view if successful.
Fill out the #index action of the PostsController and create the corresponding view. The view should show a list of every post.
Now add logic in your Index view to display the author’s name, but only if a user is signed in.
Sign in and create a few secret posts.
Test it out – sign out and go to the index page. You should see a list of the posts but no author names. Sign in and the author names should appear. Your secrets are safe!

Additional Resources

This section contains helpful links to other content. It isn’t required, so consider it supplemental for if you need to dive deeper into something

Ruby on Rails