Rails: Accessing the username/password used for HTTP Basic Auth?

Question

I'm building a basic API where user information can be retrieved after that user's login and password are correctly sent.

Right now I'm using something like this:

http://foo:[email protected]/api/user.xml

So, what I need to do is access the user/password sent in the request (the foo and bar) but am not sure how to access that info in a Rails controller.

Then I'd check those variables via a quick User.find and then set those as the username and password variables for authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic.

It's possible I'm looking at this at the completely wrong way, but that's where I'm at right now. :)

Answer 1

The answer to your question of how to get the credentials from the request is this:

user, pass = ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic::user_name_and_password(request)

However authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic is all you need to do basic auth:

class BlahController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :authenticate

  protected

  def authenticate
    authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |username, password|
      # you probably want to guard against a wrong username, and encrypt the
      # password but this is the idea.
      User.find_by_name(username).password == password
    end
  end
end

authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic will return a 401 status if credentials are not supplied, which will pop up the username/password dialog in a browser. If details are given then those are passed to the block provided. If the block returns true the request goes through. Otherwise the request processing is aborted and a 403 status is returned to the client.

You can also check out Railscast 82 (thats were the code above is from): http://railscasts.com/episodes/82-http-basic-authentication