Email confirmation in Rails without using any existing authentication gems/plugins.

Question

I'm working on this alerting service in Rails. And really, all I need to do is, when a user signs up, send a confirmation email to the user. And upon confirmation from the user, activate the user. I tried playing around with Matt Hooks' Authlogic email activation tutorial, but its really leading nowhere. So , any ideas how I can do this with minimum fuss ? Thanks !

Answer 1

Devise is an other excellent authentication gem that comes with email activation build in, perhaps you could give it a go.

Answer 2

Assuming given the title that you definitely want to avoid Devise, Authlogic and friends, here's what I think you need to do:

• Create 'confirmation code' and 'confirmed' attributes in your user model.
• Create a new controller method on your user controller that expects a user id and confirmation code, looks up the user, checks the code in te parameter matches the code stored in the DB and if so clears the code and sets confirmed = true.
• Create a route that maps e.g. /users/1/confirm/code to your new controller method.
• Create an ActionMailer template for the e-mail you want to send. This should accept a user as a parameter, and use the confirmation code of the user to send a mail containing a link to your new route.
• Create an observer for your user model. If the record is created or the e-mail address modified, then generate a random confirmation code, set it into the model and clear the confirmed flag. Then trigger your ActionMailer.
• Create a helper method which allows views to check if the current use is confirmed.
• Use this method to enable/disable functionality as appropriate. Remember to protect your controller methods as appropriate as well as your view logic.