Sneaky Abstractions

OpenID is awesome, but getting a Rails application up and running with OpenID authentication can be a bit cumbersome. After having done that a few times, I’ve created an OpenID starter kit which will let you (and others) log in to it using OpenID. It uses the open_id_authentication plugin, which takes away a lot of the nitty-gritty of authentication.

It uses a couple of gems, which can be installed using

rake gems:install

When you have those installed, all you have to do is copy the config/database.yml.example file to config/database.yml, check the settings (default Rails config with SQLite) and run rake db:migrate. Then, just run script/server and log in and out as much as you want.