Devise VS authentication-zero

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.

Subsequently, we need a way to authenticate our users to associate prompts with them. Rather than using an incumbent like Devise, I chose to use a different approach. The authentication-zero gem can flexibly generate an authentication system, as opposed to including it as an engine. Conveniently, it comes with options such as:

If you don’t need a good amount of features that Devise brings to the table, I‘d skip it entirely. Look up has_secure_password, that will be enough for a vast amount of applications with authentication. Maybe combine with cancancan for authorization. Once you feel you have a grip on those, re-evaluate devise or take a look at https://github.com/lazaronixon/authentication-zero which will transparently integrate into your app instead of providing a Rube Goldberg machine (that’s what devise will feel like for beginners for a long time).

I keep going back and forth between Devise and something a little more friendly like authentication-zero gem for authentication.

For those that have used the authentication-zero gem or are familiar with its functionality, what is the best way to upgrade it in a project when new functionality is released?

True. I tend to stay away from gems that try to integrate into multiple parts of your app to provide some sort of comprehensive solution. The kinds of gems I recommend are: 1) libraries (you call into them when you need them) 2) mounted apps on a url, isolated from the rest of your app 3) generators (this one seems nice, the author mentioned it in another HN thread: https://github.com/lazaronixon/authentication-zero).

Check out https://github.com/lazaronixon/authentication-zero

I prefer to use authentication-zero, which generates code for me in the same application using has_secure_password, has good security practices, uses the same functions as Rails, and allows me to modify the flow to my liking.