Restful-Authentication on Rails 3.1 RC1

While working on a small side project I decided to go with the bleeding edge and use Rails 3.1 RC1. One issue I ran into with this though is that they changed the generator scripts so the most instructions for the restful-authentication plugin didn’t work.

First of all the original plugin isn’t yet working on Rails 3 so there is a fork by vinsol that you can use instead.

After running: rails generate authenticated user session I did try to load /signup and was greeted by the following error:

uninitialized constant ApplicationController::AuthenticatedSystem

Looking throuhg sessions_controller.rb and users_controller.rb i found that both include AuthenticatedSystem with instructions to move that into application_controller.rb

Doing so unfortunately doesn’t work out of the box since rails apparently changed search-paths for libs so make sure to include the following in your application_controller.rb:

require File.join(Rails.root, 'lib', 'authenticated_system.rb')
include AuthenticatedSystem

At first I only tried require, but as it turns out require only loads a file and executes it (like include does in C) while include actually copies methods from another module to the current one.

Both are required for restful-authentication to work obviously, or your sessions_controller will throw errors like this one: undefined method `logout_keeping_session!' for #<UsersController:0x8fc409c>.

Hope this helps, it took me some time to figure this out, but I guess this is mostly because I am a total stranger to the Rails platform.