has_secure_password with Rails 4.1

I just started a new project with Rails 4.1 and explored the has_secure_password feature. Really awesome stuff!

I hope you are not storing passwords in clear text to your database! You should always store some kind of hashed values instead of clear text passwords. In case somebody steals your database he/she still doesn’t has the passwords.

There are a couple good tutorials how to hash and store passwords in a secure way. I implemented it a couples times by myself with Ruby.

A more sophisticated solution is devise, a very robust gem for security and authentication.

However. Since Rails 3.1 you can take advantage of has_secure_password. This mechanism in Rails takes care of password validation and encryption. It requires a field ‘password_digest’ in your model, where it will store the encrypted password. Let’s generate a simple model.

rails g model user username:string password_digest:string

Let’s add this line to the user model.


This will add an attribute password and password_confirmation to your model. This 2 fields are now part of your model but not part of the database schema! Because we don’t want to store cleartext passwords.

Let’s add some tests.

require 'spec_helper'

describe User do

  it "fails because no password" do
    User.new({:username => "hans"}).save.should be_false

  it "fails because passwrod to short" do
    User.new({:username => "hans", :password => 'han'}).save.should be_false

  it "succeeds because password is long enough" do
    User.new({:username => "hans", :password => 'hansohanso'}).save.should be_true


3 very simple tests. Persisting a new user without password should fail. Persisting a new user with too short password should fail as well. And creating a new user with a long password should succeed. If you run this tests with RSpec the 2nd test will fail. By default Rails doesn’t has a validation for the length of the password. So let’s add it to our user model.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  validates :password, :length => { :minimum => 5 }


If you run the tests again, they will be green. If you take a look into your database you will see that the user table/collection has a column password_digest with a very cryptical value. But there are no columns for password! That’s exactly what we wanted.

Now lets do the authentication. Assume a new user signed up at your portal and now he wants to login. This is how you authenticate him.

user = User.find_by_username("USERNAME").authenticate("CLEAR_TEXT_PASSWORD")

If the username and the clear text password from the HTTP Request is correct it will return a valid user from the database. Otherwise it will return nil!

has_secure_password validates the password on creation time, the very first time you persist it. It doesn’t check the password field after that, for updates for example. And that’s OK. Because that means you can load a user later from db, change it and persist it without knowing the password.

Another feature of this mechanism is password confirmation. has_secure_password also adds an attribute password_confirmation to your model. This attribute gets only validated if it’s not nil. If it’s not nil it must be equal to the password attribute. Let’s add 2 more tests for that one.

  it "fails because password confirmation doesnt match" do
    User.new({:username => "hans",
      :password => 'hansohanso',
      :password_confirmation => 'aa'}).save.should be_false

  it "succeeds because password & confirmation match" do
    User.new({:username => "hans",
      :password => 'hansohanso',
      :password_confirmation => 'hansohanso'}).save.should be_true

To make this tests pass you have to add one more line to the model.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base   
  validates_confirmation_of :password

The line “validates_confirmation_of :password” will check the password confirmation.

Rails doesn’t force you to have a password confirmation for your model, but if you want it you can turn it on.

I really like this feature because it saves me a lot of code and development time. And for most applications this is really enough.

Let me know what you think about this, either in the comments or on Twitter.

Ruby on Rails + ElasticSearch

This is a tutorial how to use ElasticSearch with Ruby on Rails. ElasticSearch is a distributed RESTful Search Engine build on top of Apache Lucene.

Sure! You can use your SQL database for search. But that is usually slow and you will not get very good search results. With ElasticSearch you can deliver a fuzzy search. Let’s say you have a record “Hibernate” in the database. If somebody is doing a search for “hibernate” you will get a match with a simple SQL query. But what if your customers input looks like this:

  • hibernate 3.2
  • hibernate.jar
  • hibernate.jar 3.5

In this cases you will have 0 results with a simple SQL query. With ElasticSearch you would still have results. Depending on your configuration. So let’s start!


Just download the current version from here: http://www.elasticsearch.org/download/. Unpack it and run the ES server with this command:

./bin/elasticsearch -f

The ES server is now running on localhost:9200. If you type in “http://localhost:9200/_search” into your browser you should get some basic results.

I assume that you know already Ruby on Rails and ActiveRecord. Of course there is a GEM to interact with ElasticSearch. Checkout the Tire GEM. That is a pretty good wrapper for ElastisSearch. Just add it to your Gemfile.

gem 'tire', '0.5.4'

and run:

bundle update

In your application.rb you need to require the new package:

require 'tire'

And in environment.rb you need to init the package:

  Tire.configure do
    logger STDERR
    url Settings.elasticsearch_url
rescue => e
  p "Wrong configuration: #{e}"

On the GitHub Page there is a description how to integrate Tire into your model. But honestly I don’t like that very much. That just blows up the model class. I prefer a clear separation between my models and the interaction with ElasticSearch.

The model I wanted to map and to make searchable with ElastiSearch is “product.rb”. It is located in “app/models/”. I created another directory called “app/elastics/”. And here I placed a new file “product_elastic.rb”, which is mapping my Product class to ElasticSearch and is responsible for the interaction with the ES server.

The first thing you have to do is to create a mapping. You have to map your properties from your model to ElasticSearch. This is how I did my first mapping:

def self.create_index_with_mappings
  Tire.index Settings.elasticsearch_product_index do
    create :mappings => {
      :product => {
        :properties => {
          :_id => { :type => 'string', :analyzer => 'keyword', :include_in_all => false },
          :name => {:type => 'string', :analyzer => 'snowball', :boost => 100},
          :description => { :type => 'string', :analyzer => 'snowball' },
          :description_manual => { :type => 'string', :analyzer => 'snowball' },
          :language => { :type => 'string', :analyzer => 'keyword'}

The analyzers are documented on the ElasticSearch homepage: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/. Here is the magic happening 😉

Than I wrote 2 more methods (clean_all and reset) to delete the “product” index at ES and to create the mappings.

def self.clean_all
  Tire.index( Settings.elasticsearch_product_index ).delete

def self.reset

Don’t call the reset method in production 😉 With this 3 methods you can delete old mapping and create a new one. You can now run the rails console and try out the methods. That should all work fine.

If creating the mapping was successful, the next step is to index the data in the database. To index a model, the model itself must offer a method which returns their values as JSON. I added a “to_indexex_json” method to the Product class:

def to_indexed_json
   :_id => self.id.to_s,
   :_type => "product",
   :name => self.name,
   :description => self.description ? self.description : "" ,
   :description_manual => self.description_manual ? self.description_manual : "" ,
   :language => self.language,
   :group_id => self.group_id ? self.group_id : "",
   :prod_key => self.prod_key,

The first 2 attributes are required by Tire, to link the response from ES with your model. And here is the method in “product_elastic.rb” to index one record.

def self.index( product )
  Tire.index Settings.elasticsearch_product_index do
    store product.to_indexed_json
    product.update_attribute(:reindex, false)
rescue => e
  p "ERROR in index(product) Message: #{e.message}"
  p "ERROR in index(product) backtrace: #{e.backtrace}"

And this here is the method to index all products from the DB:

def self.index_all
  Product.all.each do |product|
    ProductElastic.index product

def self.refresh
  Tire.index( Settings.elasticsearch_product_index ).refresh

Easy! Right? You can try the methods in the rails console. All right. You can now create mappings and index data. The only thing which is missing now is the search method. There is a lot to say about the search. I really recommend that you take your time and read the documentation about the search at the Tire homepage and the ES homepage. But here is one example.

def self.search(q, page_count = 1)
  if (q.nil? || q.empty?)
    raise ArgumentError, "query is empty! This is not allowed"

  page_count = 1 if page_count.nil? || page_count.to_i < 1
  results_per_page = 30
  from = results_per_page * (page_count.to_i - 1)

  q = "*" if !q || q.empty?

  s = Tire.search( Settings.elasticsearch_product_index,
   load: true,
   from: from,
   per_page: results_per_page,
   size: results_per_page) do |search|

    search.sort { by [{:_score => 'desc'}] }

    search.query do |query|
      query.string "name:" + q



The method above is with paging. You can easily use it with the “will_paginate” GEM.

There is much more to say about the mapping and the search. But this is the part there you have to invest time to figure it out, to deliver the search results you want. You will find a pretty good documentation on the ElasticSearch homepage: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/. And the core committer from the Tire project always responded in less than 24 hours to my tickets. The project support is very good.

Together with Timo I integrated ElasticSearch into VersionEye. Since them the search is much faster and the results are better. Even if there is no perfect match you will get results.

Rails ActiveRecord by-pass validation

ActiveRecord is my favorite way to access a SQL database. It offers very useful validation inside of a model. But sometimes you just want to save an attribute quickly, without validating the whole object. For that you can pass a parameter to the save method.

object.save(:validate => false)

That saved me a lot of time. Awesome!



“You are being redirected”


SSL in Ruby on Rails

There is a very good support for SSL in Ruby on Rails. Assuming that you installed a valid SSL certificat on your production server or on your PaaS Provider (Heroku), it is very easy to switch all links to https. If you want to force every link to https, just add this line to your production.rb

config.force_ssl = true

This is a good way to deliver the whole app over https. If you are writing an Online Banking Software, this is the way to go. Otherwise I would not recommend that.

There are several reasons not to deliver every page via https. The most important reason for me is speed. Usually the SSL Handshake between Server and Browser takes 50 to 100 ms. But in a bad case it can take 600 ms. That is a big performance issue.

I recommend to enable https just for certain pages. For example for Registration Pages, Login Pages and Settings Pages. That can be achieved pretty easy by adding this line to the controller.


it is like a filter. You can customize it with “only” and “except”.

class SessionsController < ApplicationController

  force_ssl :only => [:new, :create]

  def new
    @title = "Sign in"

  # ... more ruby code here


This will force just certain links to https. If you want to switch back to regular http, you can use this filter here:

def force_http
  if request.ssl? && Rails.env.production?
    redirect_to :protocol => 'http://', :status => :moved_permanently

Just add it to a controller like this:

before_filter :force_http

If you forced before everything to https and afterwards you decide to force some pages to http, than you can run in an recursive redirect issue. The Browser remembers that the pages is just available via https, but your server is redirecting to http. If you get this issue you have to clear your Browser cache.

Cron Jobs on Heroku

Heroku is an App Engine for Ruby on Rails … and other Languages and Frameworks. Heroku is running your application and you don’t have to care about hardware or IT-Infrastructure. It is one abstraction layer above the Amazon Cloud EC2.

First of all, there are no cron jobs on Heroku. Because it is an App Engine you don’t have access to the linux os and the native cron daemon or crontab. Forget it! You have to use heroku worker dynos. Keep reading.

Usually you push your rails app via git to Heroku like this:

git push heroku master

and then it will be deployed on x web dynos. There are different kind of dynos. The default is “web”. If you want to do some background jobs you need a “worker” dyno. You can add worker dynos with this command:

heroku ps:scale worker=1

Now you have to create a Procfile in the root of your application. That can look like this:

web: bundle exec rails server -p $PORT
worker: bundle exec rake do_work

The Procfile is defining the different types of dynos which are available for your application. With “heroku ps:scale” you can scale the dyno types. If you want to have 7 web dynos and 1 worker just execute this:

heroku ps:scale web=7 worker=1

And Heroku will immediately deploy your web application on 7 web dynos and your background job on 1 worker dyno. That is fucking awesome!

All right we added one worker dyno and we defined in the Procfile that “bundle exec rake do_work” should be executed on the worker dyno. Now we just have to define the task “do_work” in the Rakefile.

There are different GEMs for scheduling jobs. For example clockwork, rufus and Qu. I prefer a more simple/native way. With a couple lines of code you can write your own scheduler. This rake task here is executing jobs at a given time. In this example every day at 07:00 AM.

task :do_work => :environment do
  puts "START"

  start_hour = 7
  start_minute = 0

  until 2 < 1 do
    now = Time.now
    hour = now.hour
    minute = now.min
    if hour == start_hour && minute == start_minute

      puts " do work #{Time.now}"

      # execute code here !!!

      if Time.now.hour == start_hour && Time.now.min == start_minute

Just replace the comment with your code. And push it to heroku

heroku maintenance:on
git push heroku master
heroku maintenance:off

That’s it.