Rails authentication with email & password.
Clearance is intended to be small, simple, and well-tested. It has opinionated defaults but is intended to be easy to override.
Please use GitHub Issues to report bugs. If you have a question about the
library, please use the clearance tag on Stack Overflow. This tag is
monitored by contributors.
Clearance is a Rails engine tested against Rails >= 7.0 and Ruby >= 3.1.6.
You can add it to your Gemfile with:
gem "clearance"Run the bundle command to install it.
After you install Clearance, you need to run the generator:
rails generate clearance:installThe Clearance install generator:
- Inserts
Clearance::Userinto yourUsermodel - Inserts
Clearance::Controllerinto yourApplicationController - Creates an initializer file to allow further configuration.
- Creates a migration file that either create a users table or adds any necessary columns to the existing table.
Override any of these defaults in config/initializers/clearance.rb:
Clearance.configure do |config|
config.allow_sign_up = true
config.allow_password_reset = true
config.cookie_domain = ".example.com"
config.cookie_expiration = lambda { |cookies| 1.year.from_now.utc }
config.cookie_name = "remember_token"
config.cookie_path = "/"
config.routes = true
config.httponly = true
config.mailer_sender = "reply@example.com"
config.password_strategy = Clearance::PasswordStrategies::BCrypt
config.redirect_url = "/"
config.url_after_destroy = nil
config.url_after_denied_access_when_signed_out = nil
config.rotate_csrf_on_sign_in = true
config.same_site = nil
config.secure_cookie = Rails.configuration.force_ssl
config.signed_cookie = false
config.sign_in_guards = []
config.user_model = "User"
config.parent_controller = "ApplicationController"
config.sign_in_on_password_reset = false
endUse the require_login filter to control access to controller actions.
class ArticlesController < ApplicationController
before_action :require_login
def index
current_user.articles
end
endClearance also provides routing constraints that can be used to control access at the routing layer:
Blog::Application.routes.draw do
constraints Clearance::Constraints::SignedIn.new { |user| user.admin? } do
root to: "admin/dashboards#show", as: :admin_root
end
constraints Clearance::Constraints::SignedIn.new do
root to: "dashboards#show", as: :signed_in_root
end
constraints Clearance::Constraints::SignedOut.new do
root to: "marketing#index"
end
endUse current_user, signed_in?, and signed_out? in controllers, views, and
helpers. For example:
<% if signed_in? %>
<%= current_user.email %>
<%= button_to "Sign out", sign_out_path, method: :delete %>
<% else %>
<%= link_to "Sign in", sign_in_path %>
<% end %>When a user resets their password, Clearance delivers them an email. You
should change the mailer_sender default, used in the email's "from" header:
Clearance.configure do |config|
config.mailer_sender = "reply@example.com"
endYou can support multiple domains, or other special domain configurations by
optionally setting cookie_domain as a callable object. The first argument
passed to the method is an ActionDispatch::Request object.
Clearance.configure do |config|
config.cookie_domain = lambda { |request| request.host }
endClearance adds its session to the Rack environment hash so middleware and other Rack applications can interact with it:
class Bubblegum::Middleware
def initialize(app)
@app = app
end
def call(env)
if env[:clearance].signed_in?
env[:clearance].current_user.bubble_gum
end
@app.call(env)
end
endSee config/routes.rb for the default set of routes.
As of Clearance 1.5 it is recommended that you disable Clearance routes and take full control over routing and URL design. This ensures that your app's URL design won't be affected if the gem's routes and URL design are changed.
To disable the routes, change the routes configuration option to false:
Clearance.configure do |config|
config.routes = false
endYou can optionally run rails generate clearance:routes to dump a copy of the
default routes into your application for modification.
See app/controllers/clearance for the default behavior. Many protected methods were extracted in these controllers in an attempt to make overrides and hooks simpler.
To override a Clearance controller, subclass it and update the routes to point to your new controller (see the "Routes" section).
class PasswordsController < Clearance::PasswordsController
class SessionsController < Clearance::SessionsController
class UsersController < Clearance::UsersControllerThe post-action redirects in Clearance are simple methods which can be overridden one by one, or configured globally.
These "success" methods are called for signed in users, and redirect to
Clearance.configuration.redirect_url (which is / by default):
passwords#url_after_updatesessions#url_after_createsessions#url_for_signed_in_usersusers#url_after_createapplication#url_after_denied_access_when_signed_in
To override them all at once, change the global configuration of redirect_url.
To change individual URLs, override the appropriate method in your subclassed
controller.
These "failure" methods are called for signed out sessions:
application#url_after_denied_access_when_signed_outsessions#url_after_destroy
You can override the appropriate method in your subclassed controller or you can set a configuration value for either of these URLs:
Clearance.configuration.url_after_denied_access_when_signed_outClearance.configuration.url_after_destroy
Both configurations default to nil and if not set will default to
sign_in_url in sessions_controller.rb and authorization.rb for backwards
compatibility.
See app/views for the default behavior.
To override a view, create your own copy of it:
app/views/clearance_mailer/change_password.html.erb
app/views/passwords/create.html.erb
app/views/passwords/edit.html.erb
app/views/passwords/new.html.erb
app/views/sessions/_form.html.erb
app/views/sessions/new.html.erb
app/views/users/_form.html.erb
app/views/users/new.html.erb
You can use the Clearance views generator to copy the default views to your application for modification.
rails generate clearance:viewsBy default, Clearance uses your application's default layout. If you would like
to change the layout that Clearance uses when rendering its views, simply
specify the layout in the config/application.rb
config.to_prepare do
Clearance::PasswordsController.layout "my_passwords_layout"
Clearance::SessionsController.layout "my_sessions_layout"
Clearance::UsersController.layout "my_admin_layout"
endAll flash messages and email subject lines are stored in i18n translations. Override them like any other translation.
See config/locales/clearance.en.yml for the default behavior.
You can also install clearance-i18n for access to additional, user-contributed translations.
See lib/clearance/user.rb for the default behavior. You can override those methods as needed.
Note that there are some model-level validations (see above link for detail)
which the Clearance::User module will add to the configured model class and
which may conflict with or duplicate already present validations on the email
and password attributes. Over-riding the email_optional? or
skip_password_validation? methods to return true will disable those
validations from being added.
By default, Clearance uses unsigned cookies. If you would like to use signed cookies you can do so by overriding the default in an initializer like so:
Clearance.configure do |config|
# ... other overrides
config.signed_cookie = true
endIf you are currently not using signed cookies but would like to migrate your
users over to them without breaking current sessions, you can do so by passing
in :migrate rather than true as so:
Clearance.configure do |config|
# ... other overrides
config.signed_cookie = :migrate
endYou can read more about signed cookies in Clearance and why they are a good idea in the pull request that added them.
By default, Clearance will sign in any user with valid credentials. If you need to support additional checks during the sign in process then you can use the SignInGuard stack. For example, using the SignInGuard stack, you could prevent suspended users from signing in, or require that users confirm their email address before accessing the site.
SignInGuards offer fine-grained control over the process of
signing in a user. Each guard is run in order and hands the session off to
the next guard in the stack.
A SignInGuard is an object that responds to call. It is initialized with a
session and the current stack.
On success, a guard should call the next guard or return SuccessStatus.new if
you don't want any subsequent guards to run.
On failure, a guard should call FailureStatus.new(failure_message). It can
provide a message explaining the failure.
For convenience, a SignInGuard class has been
provided and can be inherited from. The convenience class provides a few methods
to help make writing guards simple: success, failure, next_guard,
signed_in?, and current_user.
Here's an example custom guard to handle email confirmation:
Clearance.configure do |config|
config.sign_in_guards = ["EmailConfirmationGuard"]
end# app/guards/email_confirmation_guard.rb
class EmailConfirmationGuard < Clearance::SignInGuard
def call
if unconfirmed?
failure("You must confirm your email address.")
else
next_guard
end
end
def unconfirmed?
signed_in? && !current_user.confirmed_at
end
endClearance includes middleware that avoids wasting time spent visiting, loading, and submitting the sign in form. It instead signs in the designated user directly. The speed increase can be substantial.
Enable the Middleware in Test:
# config/environments/test.rb
MyRailsApp::Application.configure do
# ...
config.middleware.use Clearance::BackDoor
# ...
endUsage:
visit root_path(as: user)Additionally, if User#to_param is overridden, you can pass a block in
order to override the default behavior:
# config/environments/test.rb
MyRailsApp::Application.configure do
# ...
config.middleware.use Clearance::BackDoor do |username|
Clearance.configuration.user_model.find_by(username: username)
end
# ...
endIf you're using RSpec, you can generate feature specs to help prevent
regressions in Clearance's integration with your Rails app over time. These
feature specs, will also require factory_bot_rails.
To Generate the clearance specs, run:
rails generate clearance:specsTo test controller actions that are protected by before_action :require_login,
require Clearance's test helpers in your test suite.
For rspec, add the following line to your spec/rails_helper.rb or
spec/spec_helper if rails_helper does not exist:
require "clearance/rspec"For test-unit, add this line to your test/test_helper.rb:
require "clearance/test_unit"Note for Rails 5: the default generated controller tests are now integration tests. You will need to use the backdoor middleware instead.
This will make Clearance::Controller methods work in your controllers
during functional tests and provide access to helper methods like:
sign_in
sign_in_as(user)
sign_outDoes the view or helper you're testing reference signed_in?, signed_out? or
current_user? If you require 'clearance/rspec', you will have the following
helpers available in your view specs:
sign_in
sign_in_as(user)These will make the clearance view helpers work as expected by signing in either
a new instance of your user model (sign_in) or the object you pass to
sign_in_as. If you do not call one of these sign in helpers or otherwise set
current_user in your view specs, your view will behave as if there is no
current user: signed_in? will be false and signed_out? will be true.
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md. Thank you, contributors!
For security issues it's better to contact security@thoughtbot.com (See https://thoughtbot.com/security)
Clearance is copyright © 2009 thoughtbot. It is free software, and may be
redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.
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