Question

I am trying to split my current Ruby on Rails 3 web-application and it’s web-services (API). My web-application is running on Heroku and implements API as a namespaced route within my application. For example /events returns a HTML page and /api/v1/events returns a JSON data.

According to some best practices, I want to split those into two different applications. I have chosen Sinatra to implement the API application. It works now for simple requests where authentication is not required.

My Ruby on Rails 3 application is using Devise to authenticate users. There’s also ability to login with Facebook account. Now what I want to achieve, is HTTP Basic Authentication of users (including registration) through my Sinatra-based API by using Warden.

What is the best way to do that? Or maybe I can use something different then Warden?

Keep in mind that I am not very familiar with Rack 🙂

Answer 1

I was able to get it working. There were a few main aspects:

• Get Devise working with Rails (Devise is a Rails app, won’t work
  without it)
• Setup the mapping (route) on Rack level to support both Rails and Sinatra
• Share the sessions between Rails and Sinatra
• Setup Warden and make it available to Sinatra

Here is most relevant part of code from /config.ru:

    #

    # ...

    # Rest with Rails
    map "/" do
      run MyApp::Application
    end

    # Anything urls starting with /slim will go to Sinatra
    map "/slim" do

      # make sure :key and :secret be in-sync with initializers/secret_store.rb initializers/secret_token.rb
      use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => '<< see, initializers/secret_store.rb >>', :secret => '<< copy from initializers/secret_token.rb >>'

      # Point Warden to the Sinatra App
      use Warden::Manager do |manager|
        manager.failure_app = AppMain
        manager.default_scope = Devise.default_scope
      end

      # Borrowed from https://gist.github.com/217362
      Warden::Manager.before_failure do |env, opts|
        env['REQUEST_METHOD'] = "POST"
      end

      run AppMain
    end

See, http://labnote.beedesk.com/sinatra-warden-rails-devise for a complete solution.