Thor VS Devise

Ruby has always been a great general-purpose scripting language and is often used to create command-line utilities. Many of these use the excellent Thor gem to parse command-line options, but there's no escaping one fact: command-line utilities just aren't interesting. Never have been, never will be.

All public methods in the generator will be called one after the other. Private methods will not be called but are available in your public methods like regular Ruby classes.

ruby: http://whatisthor.com

I will add that if you want to develop a CLI tool that gives you various commands that you can run, I would have a look at something like thor to keep it organised and documented. But this is completely unnecessary as a first step - you can simply create a Ruby file that does a thing you want and invoke it directly.

Not to be confused with generator functions (which you might be familiar with from Python or Javascript), Rails generators are custom Thor commands that focus on, well, generating things.

I wanted to provide a command-line interface for the user that was easy to use, and I also wanted to provide the flexibility with the options used to render the animation. After looking around online I found that Thor was a good tool to utilize. It allowed me to easily create a number of options that make this program much more versatile. An example below shows how a user can select which folder the source images are in, as well as what the background and foreground colors should be:

I've used Thor a lot, but it's kind of terrible. It uses a custom non-POSIX-compliant option parser (ex: method_option :list, type: :array -> --list one two three, where as the POSIX way is --list one,two,three or --item one -- item two --item three) and will not error on unknown options or exit with -1 when not enough args are given. If you want a better CLI library, checkout dry-rb, command_kit, or cmdparse.

And Thor might be worth looking at if you have complex scripts: https://github.com/erikhuda/thor

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.