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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T18:34:41+00:00

I’m exploring Rails for the first time and trying to add some fairly straightforward

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I’m exploring Rails for the first time and trying to add some fairly straightforward role-based security to my test app. Some Googling seemed to indicate rails-authorization is the way to go for this. I followed the README and everything seemed to be going well, but now I’m trying to associate a User with a Role and it fails. Here’s the snippet from my script/console session:

>> u = User.find(:first)
=> #<User id: 1, login: "cwhit", name: "", email: "cwhitfield@unica.com", crypted_password: "7ac064547fb8992e8e53e936df31657a40f9c5af", salt: "56671492059f8e40eb3d509940944aaba31ebc72", created_at: "2009-03-26 18:06:04", updated_at: "2009-03-26 18:06:04", remember_token: nil, remember_token_expires_at: nil>
>> r = Role.find(:first)
=> #<Role id: 1, name: "ProjectManager", authorizable_type: nil, authorizable_id: nil, created_at: "2009-03-27 11:02:35", updated_at: "2009-03-27 11:02:35">
>> u.has_role r
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PGError: ERROR:  column "id" does not exist
LINE 1: ....546623', '2009-03-27 11:42:16.546623', 5, 1) RETURNING "id"
                                                                   ^
: INSERT INTO "roles_users" ("created_at", "updated_at", "role_id", "user_id") VALUES('2009-03-27 11:42:16.546623', '2009-03-27 11:42:16.546623', 5, 1) RETURNING "id"

Am I just doing something silly, or is this a known issue? I found essentially the same error in a question in the Google Group for the rails-authorization plugin, but there was no solution provided.

Here’s my basic config:

  • OS X
  • Rails 2.3.2
  • PostgresQL
  • Plugins:
    • restful-authentication
    • rails-authorization
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try installing the composite_primary_keys gem (link) and add the following to the RolesUser controller:

    set_primary_keys :user_id, :role_id

    Since there is no id field for that table (and there doesn’t need to be), the primary key becomes (user_id, role_id) which you can add to the database with

     ALTER TABLE roles_users ADD PRIMARY KEY (user_id, role_id);

    This solved the problem in my case, which seems to be Postgres-specific.

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