Module | ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic
In: | lib/action_controller/http_authentication.rb

Makes it dead easy to do HTTP Basic authentication.

Simple Basic example:

      class PostsController < ApplicationController
        USER_NAME, PASSWORD = "dhh", "secret"

        before_filter :authenticate, :except => [ :index ]

        def index
          render :text => "Everyone can see me!"
        end

        def edit
          render :text => "I'm only accessible if you know the password"
        end

        private
          def authenticate
            authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |user_name, password|
              user_name == USER_NAME && password == PASSWORD
            end
          end
      end

Here is a more advanced Basic example where only Atom feeds and the XML API is protected by HTTP authentication, the regular HTML interface is protected by a session approach:

      class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
        before_filter :set_account, :authenticate

        protected
          def set_account
            @account = Account.find_by_url_name(request.subdomains.first)
          end

          def authenticate
            case request.format
            when Mime::XML, Mime::ATOM
              if user = authenticate_with_http_basic { |u, p| @account.users.authenticate(u, p) }
                @current_user = user
              else
                request_http_basic_authentication
              end
            else
              if session_authenticated?
                @current_user = @account.users.find(session[:authenticated][:user_id])
              else
                redirect_to(login_url) and return false
              end
            end
          end
      end

In your integration tests, you can do something like this:

      def test_access_granted_from_xml
        get(
          "/notes/1.xml", nil,
          :authorization => ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic.encode_credentials(users(:dhh).name, users(:dhh).password)
        )

        assert_equal 200, status
      end

Simple Digest example:

      require 'digest/md5'
      class PostsController < ApplicationController
        REALM = "SuperSecret"
        USERS = {"dhh" => "secret", #plain text password
                 "dap" => Digest:MD5::hexdigest(["dap",REALM,"secret"].join(":"))  #ha1 digest password

        before_filter :authenticate, :except => [:index]

        def index
          render :text => "Everyone can see me!"
        end

        def edit
          render :text => "I'm only accessible if you know the password"
        end

        private
          def authenticate
            authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest(REALM) do |username|
              USERS[username]
            end
          end
      end

NOTE: The `authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest` block must return the user‘s password or the ha1 digest hash so the framework can appropriately

          hash to check the user's credentials. Returning +nil+ will cause authentication to fail.
          Storing the ha1 hash: MD5(username:realm:password), is better than storing a plain password. If
          the password file or database is compromised, the attacker would be able to use the ha1 hash to
          authenticate as the user at this +realm+, but would not have the user's password to try using at
          other sites.

On shared hosts, Apache sometimes doesn‘t pass authentication headers to FCGI instances. If your environment matches this description and you cannot authenticate, try this rule in your Apache setup:

      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [E=X-HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},QSA,L]

### Methods

authenticate authentication_request authorization decode_credentials encode_credentials user_name_and_password

### Classes and Modules

Module ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic::ControllerMethods

### Public Instance methods

authenticate(controller, &login_procedure)
authentication_request(controller, realm)
authorization(request)
decode_credentials(request)
encode_credentials(user_name, password)
user_name_and_password(request)

[Validate]