Devise VS Sorcery

Since Rails 7, there's more and more tooling that enables us, developers, to roll our own authentication. Devise is great and has been an amazing companion over the years. It also has this neat little feature - an authenticated route constraint which "hides" certain routes from people that are not signed in.

[changelog] https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md [upgrade guide] https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/wiki/How-To:-Upgrade-to-Devise-4.9.0-%5BHotwire-Turbo-integration%5D

As much as this article is about user authorization, there's something important we need to cover: user authentication. Without it, any authorization policies we try to define later on will be useless. But there is no need to write authentication from scratch. Let's use Devise.

With around 50 new gems released daily, it is common to use trending libraries for managing everyday tasks. You probably use Devise for authentication, Cancan for authorization, Kaminari for pagination, or run tests with Rspec.

Devise is an authentication library built on top of Warden, a Rack-based authentication framework.

devise: An authentication library designed for Rails

I used Devise, this is a Ruby on Rails app

In this article, we will explore how to implement authentication in a Rails 7 application using the popular devise gem. Authentication is a crucial aspect of web development, allowing users to securely access and interact with your application. By following this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to set up devise, configure authentication routes, create user models, and enhance your application with authentication features.

I have been using devise for a while and it has consistently given me issues. I have wistfully been staring at sorcery for a while now but cant justify the switch since devise is already in the project.

I made a 8 minutes video tutorial (following the wiki: https://github.com/Sorcery/sorcery/wiki/Simple-Password-Authentication) to introduce how to build a simple password authentication feature with Sorcery. With some minor modification to please Turbo.

We'll be installing Sorcery based off this tutorial in their wiki. I'm modifying a little bit since we are creating something different, but also because their tutorial is a bit outdated since it is based off an older version of Rails.

But does it have to be so soon? There are other areas where I'm just as ignorant as I was about the inner workings of authentication (see "the database" below), and in these areas there's not a gem that can automatically solve the problem for me—which is what I've ended up doing for authentication in my own project: even though I could build authentication from scratch, instead I'm using an authentication gem because the effect is exactly the same, but with less code in my app for me to maintain. (Rather than Devise, I've chosen the more lightweight alternative Sorcery. It's simple enough that I can still understand and control the authentication flow, while also providing enough conveniences that I don't have to write out implementation details from scratch.)

Also Sorcery is, despite its name, a little less magic than Devise.

sorcery