Building Basic Authentication in Ruby on Rails the Right Way

Setting up authentication in a new Ruby on Rails project doesn't have to be complicated. Rails provides a simple, time-tested way to add authentication that respects the classic approach, keeping your application clean and maintainable.

The first step is to generate a new Rails project. Using modern defaults, such as Tailwind CSS for styles and Importmap for JavaScript, helps keep things tidy; however, the heart of the system remains the reliable Rails foundation. Once the project is created, Rails now offers a built-in generator for authentication. This sets up all the basic models and controllers needed to handle user sign-up, login, and password management. It keeps everything transparent, making it easy to understand how your authentication works behind the scenes.

With authentication in place, you can quickly scaffold resources that are tied to users. For example, creating a Post model that belongs to a user gives you a familiar structure: each post has a title, a body, and a published flag, and it's always associated with a specific user. Seeding the database with an initial admin user enables you to log in and test the application immediately. It's essential to ensure that your user and post models are correctly associated, following the traditional Rails approach of keeping models expressive and easy to reason about. The routes file should also be organized so that URLs for posts, sessions, logins, logouts, and password resets are all straightforward to remember.

One of the key components of any authentication system is the ability to verify who is currently logged in. Rails encourages this through a current_user method, which is accessible throughout your controllers and views. This allows you to tailor what each user sees—showing edit and delete links only for the posts they own, for example—and keeps things secure by ensuring only logged-in users can modify content.

In your controllers, the classic Rails approach is to require authentication for all actions that create, update, or destroy records, while allowing everyone to view posts. This keeps your blog public, but your editing privileges private, just as it should be. The logic for assigning posts to users belongs in the controller, so your forms stay simple and you avoid exposing user IDs unnecessarily.

For a traditional touch, you can add a shared header with a logout button, included in your application layout. This provides users with an easy way to sign out from anywhere within the app. By utilizing Rails' built-in error handling, you can serve a custom 404 page for any records that aren't found, providing a polished experience that adheres to the time-tested standards of web development.

Ultimately, building your authentication with Rails is not just about security or convenience; it's also about ensuring a seamless user experience. It's about understanding your tools, respecting established conventions, and creating an application that is truly yours—easy to maintain, easy to extend, and rooted in the strong traditions that have guided Rails developers for years. If you're interested in seeing how this looks in code or trying it for yourself, the ruby-auth repository on GitHub is a great reference and starting point.

This classic approach lets you keep things simple, understandable, and sustainable—a philosophy that never goes out of style.

If you'd like to see the full project or try out the code yourself, you can visit the repository here:
https://github.com/clim-bot/ruby-auth