Rails: authlogic and acl_system2 under Rails 2.3.2

Updated: Documented my migration.

I got authlogic and acl_system2 to work together under Rails 2.3.2. authlogic provides authentication. acl_system2 provide authorization, i.e. ACLs. authlogic is very up-to-date, but acl_system2 is a bit dated. That's okay, though, because it's not the sort of thing that should need to change much.

Let me cover some of the stumbling blocks I encountered after I followed the authlogic tutorial and the acl_system2 documentation.

acl_system2 is not available as a gem. Hence, you need to install it via:

script/plugin install git://github.com/ezmobius/acl_system2.git

If you followed the authlogic tutorial, you'll end up with the ApplicationController#current_user method being private. To work with acl_system2, it should instead be protected. Otherwise, you'll end up with this:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
The error occurred while evaluating nil.roles (NoMethodError)
.../vendor/plugins/acl_system2/lib/caboose/role_handler.rb:15:in `check'
.../vendor/plugins/acl_system2/lib/caboose/logic_parser.rb:43:in `process'
.../vendor/plugins/acl_system2/lib/caboose/access_control.rb:101:in `allowed?'
.../vendor/plugins/acl_system2/lib/caboose/access_control.rb:28:in `access_control'

Here's what my migration looks like:

class CreateRoles < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :roles do |t|
      t.string :title, :null => false

      t.timestamps
    end

    add_index :roles, :title, :unique => true

    create_table :roles_users, :id => false do |t|
      t.integer :role_id, :null => false, :options => "CONSTRAINT fk_role_id_roles REFERENCES roles(id)"
      t.integer :user_id, :null => false, :options => "CONSTRAINT fk_user_id_users REFERENCES users(id)"
    end

    Role.delete_all
    Role.create :title => "admin"
  end

  def self.down
    Role.delete_all
    drop_table :roles_users
    drop_table :roles
  end
end

Each of my controllers has something like:

before_filter :require_user
access_control :DEFAULT => 'admin'

I decided to add the following to ApplicationController as protected methods:

def permission_denied
  render :text => "Forbidden", :status => "403 Forbidden"
end

def permission_granted
end

That way the HTTP status gets set for "Permission denied".

In order to test the above using Cucumber and Webrat, I added a feature step like:

And the HTTP status should be "403 Forbidden"

Then, I added a step definition:

Then /^the HTTP status should be "([^\"]*)"$/ do |status|
  response.status.should == status
end

So far, I'm pleased :)