rubocop VS Pundit

gem "rubocop" - https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop | Set up code guidelines for your dev team, I recommend using whatever Standard recommends.

I believe if you use the `||` operator instead of `or`, then things just work out fine. I agree it is really annoying. But I am pretty sure if you use a tool like RuboCop https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop (a static code analysis tool) then it will catch bugs like this. Note that I am not recommending Ruby. But in my experience if you want to work with a language and it has a community style guide and a linter that enforces it, it will save me some heartache.

Adopt some sort of consistent formatting. Your top-level module starts off indented, seems like wasted space. May I suggest RuboCop?

By default, out of the box, RuboCop comes with a default set of pre-configured rules. The documentation will tell you Rubocop's default rules.

RuboCop is a Ruby static code analyzer (a.k.a. linter) and code formatter. Out of the box it will enforce many of the guidelines outlined in the community Ruby Style Guide. Apart from reporting the problems discovered in your code, RuboCop can also automatically fix many of them for you.

But I will encourage you to adopt Rubocop to enforce the style you want, so that if others want to contribute, they can write with spaces and then run rubocop -a and end up with the styling you prefer. Tabs indentation support was added a couple of years back: https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop/pull/7867

In my last job I encountered my first Rails codebase ever (mostly REST APIs but a few server-rendered views as well). After the initial chaotic impression of the codebase (it was a startup after all) with all the Rails magic on top, I really fell in love with the framework after a more experienced Rails dev introduced a few key conventions and helpful libraries to the codebase.

Out of those, I’d at least add the RuboCop [1] linter and the BetterSpecs [2] guidelines to this list. Both helped tremendously in eliminating bikeshedding in the team and freeing up brainpower to solve actual problems. The first one helped me learn intricacies of Ruby bit by bit right in my IDE and the latter guided us to write tests in a style that’s easy to maintain and trust.

[1] https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop

[2] https://www.betterspecs.org/

RuboCop had a setting for this but it was removed for Ruby 3 because there are valid reasons to pass a hash into a method, and linting it might break code. Here is the issue referencing the commits where it was removed, if you ever need to do this again you could just find an earlier commit.

https://github.com/varvet/pundit Popular open-source Ruby library focused around the notion of policies, giving you the freedom to implement your own approach based on that.

Can you expand a little? Here's some technical background on what we're doing:

We have our own database of every version of every rubygems package alongside its runtime dependencies (like you see at https://rubygems.org/gems/pundit).

Then we parse your Gemfile and Gemfile.lock. We use the Gemfile to figure out gem group and pinned requirements (we run turn your Gemfile into a ruby AST since Gemfiles can be arbitrary ruby code; we use bundler's APIs to parse your Gemfile.lock). This gives us all of the dependencies your rely on.

Then we let you choose one or more package that you want to upgrade and the version you want to target (let's say Rails 7.0.4.3).

Now we have [your dependencies and their current versions], [target rails version], [all of the runtime dependency constraints of these gems]. We run this through a dependency resolution algorithm (pubgrub). If it resolves then you're good to upgrade to that version of Rails without changing anything.

If this fails to resolve, it's because one or more of your current dependencies has a runtime restriction on rails (or another indirect gem being pulled in by the new rails version). This is where the optimization part comes in. The problem becomes "what is the optimal set of versions of all your dependencies that would resolve with the next version of Rails". Currently we solve for this set trying to optimize for the fewest upgrades. As our dataset of breaking changes gets better we'll change that to optimizing for the "lowest effort".

Happy to elaborate.

For authorization, I'm going back and forth with Pundit and CanCanCan

Expressing authorization rules can be a bit challenging with the use of other authorization gems, such as pundit or cancancan. The resource_policy gem provides a more concise and expressive policy definition that uses a simple block-based syntax that makes it easy to understand and write authorization rules for each attribute.

As an example of how to default to deny, consider a Ruby on Rails app (as we tend to do). The primary way a user interacts with the app is through API endpoints powered by controllers. We use Pundit, a popular authorization library for Rails, to manage user permissions.

https://github.com/varvet/pundit Popular open-source Ruby library focused around the notion of policies, giving you the freedom to implement your own approach based on that.

PS If you do mobile / web work (or something else with "detached" UI), I find that declarative access control rules are far superior to imperative ones, because they can be serialized and shipped over the wire. For example, backend running cancancan can be easily send the same rules to casl on the frontend, while if you used something like pundit to secure your backend, you either end up re-implementing it in the frontend, or sending ton of "canEdit" flags with every record.

You can use a combination of an authorization gem (https://github.com/varvet/pundit) and decorators (https://www.rubyguides.com/2018/04/decorator-pattern-in-ruby/) if you want to extend functionality based on their roles.

Use Action Policy or Pundit, and write tests for your policies. Authz is worth testing with near complete coverage.