Ruby on Rails 5

Manage Users

Whether you choose to build your own user account management system or use a gem, it's critical to know how everything fits together. Managing your users' accounts isn't an area of your app that should be a black box. By learning how to design a solid user model and web interface from scratch, you'll be in a better position to adapt, customize, leverage, and troubleshoot either your own code or a third-party gem. We'll start off by looking at how to:

• Design a solid user model
• Securely store passwords with the bcrypt gem
• Declare reasonable validations in the User model
• Create new user accounts with a sign-up form
• Display users' profile pages
• Allow a user to edit or delete their account

Authentication & Session Management

You sign in and out of web apps every day. It's so routine that it's easy to take account management features for granted. But the reality is there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Implementing account management properly in an app requires a solid understanding of sessions, cookies, filters, security concerns, and Rails conventions for authentication and authorization. We'll break it all down and look in-depth at how to:

• Add routes for a singular session resource
• Design a SessionsController to manage the session resource
• Create a sign-in form using form helpers
• Sign in (authenticate) users and remember them with sessions
• Automatically sign in a user when they create an account
• Sign out users

Authorization & Admin Users

Exactly who gets to take certain actions and do certain things in your app? What can signed-in users do? What can't they do? What can admin users do? Authorization rules tend to vary widely depending on the nature of a specific application. The good news is once you understand the basic technique, you can easily design an authorization system that works for your custom needs. You'll learn how to:

• Use before_action filters to restrict access to specific actions
• Restrict access based on signed-in status
• Redirect a user back to his intended URL after he has signed in
• Hide unauthorized features
• Allow special "admin" users to perform admin-only tasks

Many-to-Many & Through Associations

Rails has powerful conventions to help you manage many-to-many associations, but the conventions alone only take you so far. It's up to you to model the associations with the full stack in mind: from the database tables all the way through to the user interface. By way of six distinct examples (three in the videos and three in the exercises), you'll learn how to:

• Design a rich many-to-many association that connects a user to their movie reviews using a join model and a form
• Model a many-to-many association that lets a user "fave" multiple movies with a button
• Create a through association for assigning multiple genres to a movie using checkboxes
• Improve the performance of database queries
• Name associations to better express your domain

Custom Routes

URLs are the user interface of the web. We tweet and email them. We bookmark pages we want to return to later. We use embedded links to connect across web apps. As part of your app's user interface, it's critical that your URLs are both expressive and friendly. The default resource URLs are a good start, but the Rails router gives us a lot of flexibility when it comes to customizing URLs. And well-designed URLs might also end up driving more search traffic to your site! You'll learn how to:

• Generate friendly URLs for better SEO, bookmarking, and curb appeal
• Customize routes to handle scenarios beyond the basic resource routes
• Use route parameters and constraints

Best Practices, Tricks, and Techniques

As always, throughout the course you'll pick up tips, tricks, and other pro-level techniques to cut down development time and get the most out of Rails!