rspec-rails VS Devise

When starting a Rails project, you have a lot of decisions to make. Whether or not to write tests should not be one of them. The big decision is to use Minitest or Rspec. Both of those testing frameworks are great and provide everything you need to test a Rails application thoroughly.

RSpec

rspec-rails factory_bot_rails faker

Ruby testing with RSpec

After all requests have been added, we need to cover them using request specs to ensure that everything will work as expected in the future as well. To add specs, we will use the rspec-rails gem. Our plan is to cover the 4 HTTP request methods that have been added above:

as a beginner you can skip it, just focus on understanding Rails' philosophy and getting comfortable with it. However, make sure you remember to come back to unit testing later bc it's a mandatory skill for a Rails developer. Unit test can help you understand your project's specs thoroughly (assume its test coverage is more than 90%). I recommend learning RSpec instead of Rails' built-in testing tool (the one being used in the Rails tutorial iirc)

RSpec is a testing framework for Ruby that is widely used in the Ruby on Rails community. It allows developers to write and execute automated tests. RSpec promotes behavior-driven development (BDD) by providing a readable syntax for describing the expected behavior of the application.

This is where rswag comes in. It is an extension to rspec-rails for "describing and testing API operations".

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.