Devise VS JWT

[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.

Have a look at the change log for 4.9.0 here where the PR I linked was actually released: https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md.

To authenticate our users, we need to add jwt gem to our Gemfile

jwt is a Ruby implementation of the RFC 7519 OAuth JSON Web Token standard. bcrypt is a Ruby binding for the OpenBSD bcrypt() password hashing algorithm.

ruby-jwt is fairly easy to use on it's own without Devise. You might try that first and only add Devise if needed.

Generally speaking, the larger the application, the more internal and external services it has to talk to. External services usually have their own way of authenticating and authorizing third party API calls. With internal systems however, organisations prefer to use JWT tokens because of their inherent flexibility and versatility. A sample JWT based handshake between 2 rails applications using ruby-jwt would look like this -

Interesting. What's the difference between this and the standard ruby-jwt? https://github.com/jwt/ruby-jwt

jwt - encoding and decoding jwt oauth

Decoding JWTs is simple whit the help of an already implemented solution. In this section, I'll be using the ruby-jwt.