What does #self.included(base) do in Ruby on Rails' Restful Authentication?

Question

I thought we would do

helper_method :current_user, :logged_in?, :authorized?

to make these controller methods available for use as helper metho

Answer 1

As it is the first result when searching Google for "self.included(base)" I will try to give a small example on how it works. I don't know how much it differs from the restful-authentication-approach.

It is basically used to make methods from one module available in another module.

module One
  def hello
    puts 'hello from module One'
  end
end

module Two
  def self.included(base)
    base.class_eval do
      include One
    end
  end
end

class ExampleClass
  include Two
end

ExampleClass.new.hello # => hello from module One