JWT VS Sorcery

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.

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 I'm modifying a little bit since we are creating something different, but also because their tutorial is a bit outdated since it is based off an older version of Rails.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