Devise

Like many others I’ve been spending a lot of time with OAuth2 lately. The single-sign-on system we’ve built at GDS acts as a very simple oauth provider for our other apps (effectively just joining up the oauth2-provider and devise gems), and we’re probably going to be extending our API adapter code so that we can use it for those apps whose APIs need authentication. What I’d not explored for a while was the simplest way to implement app-to-app oauth where there’s no UI for user interaction so over the New Year break I pulled something together for another project. It’s all pretty straightforward but not very well documented so I thought I’d better share. ...

Adding Actions to Devise Controllers It wasn’t the most fun I could imagine having during a “holiday season” but while holed up in Chicagoland over Christmas I spent a couple of days porting a few of my older Rails apps to use a more up to date stack: Rails 3, Devise, Inherited Resources, Formtastic, etc. The idea is that if the apps are on a stack I use every day, I’ll spend less of my time reloading old tools into my head when the inevitable tweaks are required. We’ll see how that goes. ...

Its been twenty years since Coldcut formed Ninja Tune and they’ve got a lot planned to celebrate that anniversary. There’ll be events, a very special box set, and… a website featuring exclusive giveaways every week for the next twenty weeks. Ninja Tune XX launched at 4pm today. This is the rush job I’ve referred to in recent weeknotes, and it feels great to have it launched. It’s already attracting quite a bit of traffic and seems to be holding up well sitting on a little dreamhost private server (we needed cheap access to a lot of bandwidth). Under the hood it’s a Rails 3 app talking to MongoDB via mongoid. We’re using devise for authentication, formtastic for forms and InheritedResources to keep controller code to a minimum. ...