Question

I have a rails app that I enjoy developing on a sever much more than locally, slow computer, the problem is even though on the server the development environment is great I need a way to look at the pages I am working on live.

This is pretty easy if I didn’t care about the app being visible to the public but it cannot be visible anywhere except on the production server.

So I had the idea of just putting a basic httpauth up and then only I can see the rails app but it is still hosted on the server.

If I were to be doing this with apache/php I would just use a .htaccess file to protect the directory but I have no clue how to protect the application from the public using WEBrick.

If anyone has any idea I really would like to have no code changes or only code changes in files I can .gitignore so deployment is still easy.

Answer 1

You can restrict access by using Rack based basic auth or IP white listing

Basic Auth

Add the following to your config/environments/development.rb

config.middleware.use Rack::Auth::Basic, "Beta Access" do |username, password|
  'secret' == password
end

IP White Listing

I found two gems for this purpose:

rack-auth-ip

rack-ip-whitelist

I would use rack-auth-ip as it has been there for some time. Add the following to your config/environments/development.rb

config.middleware.use Rack::Auth::IP, %w( YourIPAddress )

Now, the instance is accessible only if the originating IP is in the white list.