Doing a Http basic authentication in rails

Question

Hi I\'m from Grails background and new to Rails. I wish to do http basic authentication in rails.

I have a code in grails which does basic authentication like this:<

Answer 1

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
  before_filter :http_basic_auth

  def http_basic_auth
    if ENV['HTTP_AUTH'] =~ %r{(.+)\:(.+)}
      unless authenticate_with_http_basic { |user, password|  user == $1 && password == $2 }
        request_http_basic_authentication
      end
    end
  end

and then you just need to export your environment variable with the user:password for example:

   export HTTP_AUTH=user:pass

if you are using heroku.com:

   heroku config:set HTTP_AUTH=user:pass

Answer 2

When connecting to HTTP endpoints protected by basic HTTP authentication I usually use HTTParty. HTTParty is simple wrapper for lower Ruby STD classes like net/http.

Example usage of HTTParty with basic auth.

class Delicious
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1'

  def initialize(u, p)
    @auth = {username: u, password: p}
  end

  def recent options={}
    options.merge!({basic_auth: @auth})
    self.class.get('/posts/recent', options)
  end
end

delicious = Delicious.new("<username>", "<password>")

pp delicious.recent #=> list of recent elements

Check for more examples on GitHub.