Last June, as I’ve moved into the last three weeks of @lewagon's ruby bootcamp, my teammates and I were working on marketplace apps before getting to our final projects.
The need to authorize people to sign-up with GitHub quickly arise. Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how I did it when already using Devise to handle authentification.
Hope you'll like it and find this helpful. 🙏
Basic set up
Before working on your app, you need to set some things up.
Create a application on Git Hub
First, we need to create a OAuth app on GitHub. Go to your profile, then developper settings and click New OAuth App.
Give your application a name, a URL and a callback URL. What if you want to work with localhost? Glad you asked.
For your homage URL: http://http://localhost:your_port will work perfectly
For the callback URL, you can’t use http://http://localhost:your_port because GitHub needs you to specify an address that can be publicly access. So, what do we do?
ngrok to the rescue
ngrok exposes your local web server through a public URL. So we need to install ngrok and have it listening to our local server. We’ll then be able to get a public URL and give it to GitHub.
First, run in your terminal:
brew install ngrok
Then run:
ngrok http your_port
You’ll get:
ngrok by @inconshreveable (Ctrl+C to quit)
Session Status online
Session Expires 7 hours, 59 minutes
Version 2.2.8
Region United States (us)
Web Interface http://127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding http://3aa8f0f7.ngrok.io -> localhost:3000
Forwarding https://3aa8f0f7.ngrok.io -> localhost:3000
Connections ttl opn rt1 rt5 p50 p90
0 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
And there you have your callback URL: http://3aa8f0f7.ngrok.io -> localhost:3000.
Do not forget to append your callback URL with /users/auth/github/callback.
Your development callback URL should look like this:
http://3aa8f0f7.ngrok.io/users/auth/github/callback
We’ll need to change these two URLs once we move into production. ⚠️ Be careful to use the same protocol in your app URL and callback URL. Using http in one and https in another with result in a URL mismatch.
Save your API keys in your Rails app
We don’t want our API keys being pushed to GitHub. So I’ll use the figaro gem to store these in a secure file. (Note: you could also use the .env file nowadays).
# Add figaro to your gem file@
gem 'figaro'
# In your terminal
bundle install
Figaro creates a config/application.yml to put all your API keys and adds this file in .gitignore.
Copy/paste your secret keys in config/application.yml
development:
GITHUB_ID: 8***********************b
GITHUB_SECRET: 4***********************************************3
Don’t forget to tell devise to use these keys in config/initializers/devise.rb.
config.omniauth :github, ENV['GITHUB_ID'], ENV['GITHUB_SECRET'], scope: 'user,public_repo'
Configure Omniauth GithHub with Devise
Since we use Devise to handle authentification, we don’t want to write config in config/initializers/omniauth.rb.
Let’s get down to it!
The first step is to had the Omniauth gem to your app. Go to your Gemfile:
gem 'omniauth-github'
Then run:
bundle install
Next step is to add the provider and uid columns to our User model. Remember we already declared the provider in our config/initializers/devise.rb.
rails g migration AddOmniauthToUsers provider:string uid:string
rake db:migrate
We go to user.rb and make our user omniauthable.
devise :omniauthable, omniauth_providers: %i[github]
With devise_for :users already in place, Devise will create two URL methods:
user_omniauth_authorize_path(provider)-
user_omniauth_callback_path(provider)_
Add it to your view
Paste the following code to get a simple link to test it out:
<%= link_to "Sign up with GitHub", user_github_omniauth_authorize_path %>
⚠️ The symbol passed to the user_omniauth_authorize_path method should match the symbol of the provider passed to Devise's config block.
Now, when clicking on Sign up with GitHub, people will be redirected to GitHub to give their credentials. But as for now, nothing happens when GitHub sends back the user’s data.
Add the callback to your app
Let’s go back to our config/routes.rb to tell Devise in which controller we’ll implement our callbacks:
devise_for :users, controllers: { omniauth_callbacks: 'users/omniauth_callbacks' }
Now we just add the file app/controllers/users/omniauth_callbacks_controller.rb:
class Users::OmniauthCallbacksController < Devise::OmniauthCallbacksController
end
The callback should have the same name as the provider we passed in Devise’s config block.
class Users::OmniauthCallbacksController < Devise::OmniauthCallbacksController
def github
@user = User.from_omniauth(request.env["omniauth.auth"])
if @user.persisted?
sign_in_and_redirect @user, event: :authentication #this will throw if @user is not activated
set_flash_message(:notice, :success, kind: "GitHub") if is_navigational_format?
else
session["devise.github_data"] = request.env["omniauth.auth"]
redirect_to new_user_registration_url
end
end
def failure
redirect_to root_path
end
end
Then, from the controller, we move to our user model. Here is the code from Devise documentation:
def self.from_omniauth(auth)
where(provider: auth.provider, uid: auth.uid).first_or_create do |user|
user.email = auth.info.email
user.password = Devise.friendly_token[0,20]
user.name = auth.info.name # assuming the user model has a name
user.image = auth.info.image # assuming the user model has an image
# If you are using confirmable and the provider(s) you use validate emails,
# uncomment the line below to skip the confirmation emails.
# user.skip_confirmation!
end
end
After changing the code above to suit my primary needs, I ran into several problems:
- I was using Carrierwave to upload picture on Cloudinary, so I needed to add the proper logic to the method.
- If a user was already persisted in my DB and was trying to sign-in with GitHub, he was redirect to sign-in without logging in.
So, here’s my own version of the Class method based on my schema and needs:
def self.from_omniauth(auth)
user = User.find_by(email: auth.info.email)
if user
user.provider = auth.provider
user.uid = auth.uid
user.save
else
user = User.where(provider: auth.provider, uid: auth.uid).first_or_create do |user|
user.email = auth.info.email
user.password = Devise.friendly_token[0,20]
user.first_name = auth.info.name.split(' ').first
user.last_name = auth.info.name.split(' ').second
end
end
unless user.avatar.present?
photo_url = auth.info.image
user.remote_avatar_url = photo_url # Carrierwave helper
user.save
end
user
end
What caused the second problem was that the model had two validation strategies conflicting with one another:
- Devise
- and Rails native
validatesmethod.
My user model had a validates :password, presence: true that was raising an error and preventing user from logging in. This useless line of code was caused by a lack of communication within our team. Talking more with each other would have saved us a lot of debugging ☝️.
Push into production
After testing and merging my branch on GitHub we pushed it to Heroku. It’s important at that point to go back to your GitHub app page and update the app URL and the callback URL with your domain name.
Your app URLs should now look like these:
Homepage URL: http://your_app_url.your_domain
Callback URL: http://your_app_url.your_domain/users/auth/github/callback
Also, don’t forget to give Heroku your API keys. Otherwise your production environnement will not know how to interpret config.omniauth :github, ENV['GITHUB_ID'], ENV['GITHUB_SECRET'], scope: 'user,public_repo’ in your config/initializers/devise.rb (and your users will get a magnificent 404).
Don’t forget to run:
heroku run bundle # to install the omniauth gem
heroku run rails db:migrate # to update your users schema
heroku restart
And here it is, now people can sign-up and sign-in to your app using their GitHub credentials. 🙌
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