This post describes how to use Tiddle – gem for token authentication which I created. Tiddle is a Devise authentication strategy which supports multiple tokens per user.

Last updated: 30.10.2015

Motivation

I needed token authentication strategy for Devise in JSON API application. I started by using Simple Token Authentication gem. It served me well until I realized that I need support for multiple tokens per model.

Imagine a following scenario: your API has two clients – a web application and a mobile application. User A signs in to the web application and receives a token. Then he signs in to the mobile application and receives the very same token (because there is only one token per user). At this point, user A decides to log out from the web application, so we generate a new token for him and the old token becomes invalid. What is the consequence? User A is also logged out of the mobile application!

This is not a user-friendly behaviour. We don’t want the user to be logged out of all applications, we want him to be logged out of just one application. The solution to this problem is to issue a new token after each successful log in attempt and store multiple tokens per each user. This is possible with Tiddle.

Integration with your app

Installation goes as usual, but I include it here for completeness. Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

1 gem 'tiddle'

And then execute bundle install .

You have to create model which holds authentication tokens. You can choose arbitrary model name, but following fields have to be included: body , last_used_at , ip_address and user_agent . For example, you can generate such a migration:

1 rails g model AuthenticationToken body : string user : references last_used_at :datetime ip_address :string user_agent :string

Then you have to specify :token_authenticatable in the model used for Devise authentication:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base devise :database_authenticatable , :registerable , :recoverable , :trackable , :validatable , :token_authenticatable # here it is [. . .] end

This model should also include association called authentication_tokens (the name is important), so tokens can be looked up and created inside Tiddle.

1 2 3 4 5 class User < ActiveRecord : :Base [. . .] has_many :authentication_tokens end

The last step is to subclass Devise::SessionsController as described in Devise documentation. In create action we check the provided email and password. If they are valid, we create a new authentication token and return it in the response. In destroy action we expire the current token (or do nothing if the user is not authenticated).

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 class Users :: SessionsController < Devise : :SessionsController def create user = warden . authenticate! ( auth_options ) token = Tiddle . create_and_return_token ( user , request ) render json : { authentication_token : token } end def destroy Tiddle . expire_token ( current_user , request ) if current_user render json : {} end private # this is invoked before destroy and we have to override it def verify_signed_out_user end end

And that’s it! If you want to require authenticated user in some controller, just follow the standard Devise way:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class PostsController < ApplicationController before_action :authenticate_user! # nothing fancy def index render json : Post . all end end

Every request to this endpoint has to include X-USER-EMAIL and X-USER-TOKEN headers, so the authentication strategy can look up the user by email and then check validity of the token.

You can take a look at the example Rails application which I created: https://github.com/adamniedzielski/tiddle-rails-demo

Usage in AngularJS client

This is a short example of token authentication written in AngularJS. It was tested with Angular 1.4.7. In our client we have to:

provide the email and password to obtain the token

the token save the email and token in cookies

the email and token in cookies send the email and token with every request

This is a simplified controller action which makes request to our API:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 angular . module ( 'app' ) . controller ( 'MainController' , function ( $scope , $http , $cookies ) { $scope . user = {}; $scope . login = function () { $http . post ( 'http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in.json' , { user : { email : $scope . user . email , password : $scope . user . password } }). then ( function ( response ) { $cookies . put ( "user_email" , $scope . user . email ); $cookies . put ( "user_token" , response . data . authentication_token ); }); }; });

And this is a request interceptor which adds authentication headers to every request:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 angular . module ( 'app' , [ 'ngCookies' ]); angular . module ( "app" ). config ( function ( $httpProvider ) { $httpProvider . interceptors . push ( function ( $cookies ) { return { 'request' : function ( config ) { config . headers [ 'X-USER-EMAIL' ] = $cookies . get ( "user_email" ); config . headers [ 'X-USER-TOKEN' ] = $cookies . get ( "user_token" ); return config ; } }; }); });

You can get the code of the complete AngularJS example here: https://github.com/adamniedzielski/tiddle-angular-demo

Deleting old tokens

After some time your database may be full of old tokens which are no longer used. They are the result of sign-ins which were never followed by sign-out. Tiddle has it covered – you can invoke Tiddle.purge_old_tokens(user) . You can do it in a Rake task:

1 2 3 4 5 task purge_old_authentication_tokens : :environment do User . find_each do | user | Tiddle . purge_old_tokens ( user ) end end

Note on Rails session

Tiddle was built with API-only applications in mind. In API-only application you should avoid using cookies at all. The pair of email and token is what identifies the user. However, we rely on Devise database_authenticatable strategy to perform the sign in action and in this case Devise stores user_id in Rails session.

This results in an extremely confusing situation: you send wrong token, but manage to authenticate. That’s because Rails session was sent and Devise performed authentication based on it.

The safest solution in API-only application is not to rely on Rails session at all and disable it. Put this line in your application.rb :

1 config . middleware . delete ActionDispatch : :Session :: CookieStore

Conclusion

I hope someone can benefit from Tiddle, that’s why I open sourced it. If you find any bugs, please report them at Github Issues.