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Woop Woop looking for Rack gurus out there

Ruby on Rails
#1

Hello my fellow Rails developers. Any Rack specialist out there?

I have forked out my live app to a staging app whith a dedicated staging environment; for which I’m trying to setup a username/password authentication as per the excellent “Heroku Cookbook” from Mike Coutermarsh. My staging.rb file in the Environment folder looks like:

 # Based on production defaults
  require Rails.root.join('config/environments/production')
  Jbts2018::Application.configure do
  config.middleware.use '::Rack::Auth::Basic' do |user, password|
  [user, password] == ['staging', ENV['STAGING_PASS']]
 end

end

As soon as I set the Heroku Environment as follows:

RACK_ENV: staging RAILS_ENV: staging

the app crashes miserably.

From the Heroku logs the interesting bits show:

2017-11-26T06:08:07.265653+00:00 app[api]: Set RACK_ENV config vars by user 
rodolphe@rgeant.name
2017-11-26T06:08:07.265653+00:00 app[api]: Release v63 created by user 
rodolphe@rgeant.name
2017-11-26T06:08:08.527577+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from crashed to 
starting
2017-11-26T06:08:11.994768+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `   bin/rails server -p 9534 -e 
staging`
2017-11-26T06:08:15.842600+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to 
crashed
2017-11-26T06:08:15.826934+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 1
2017-11-26T06:08:15.765330+00:00 app[web.1]: 
/app/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.4.0/gems/actionpack-
5.1.4/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/stack.rb:35:in `build': undefined method `   new' for "::Rack::Auth::Basic":String 
(NoMethodError)
2017-11-26T06:08:15.765347+00:00 app[web.1]: Did you mean?  next

There must be some error in the following snippet :

config.middleware.use '::Rack::Auth::Basic'

I’m not too sure what’s wrong though.

Any idea will be most welcome.

Many thanks!

#2

@rodolphe85 Your error message says Rack is trying to invoke "::Rack::Auth::Basic".new but it’s failing because you can’t call new on a String.

Why is it trying to call new? Because it’s expecting to be given a class, not a string.

I think you should be able to do:

config.middleware.use ::Rack::Auth::Basic do |user, password|
  # stuff
end

It’s worth mentioning that Rails ships with basic auth out of the box :smiley: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/HttpAuthentication/Basic.html

#3

Hi Joel,

Thanks for the very quick answer,

I removed the string from the block as suggested but it still fails miserably this time with the secret.key:

2017-11-30T15:25:17.001176+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from crashed to starting
2017-11-30T15:25:20.683719+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bin/rails server -p 34488 -e 
staging`
2017-11-30T15:25:24.183572+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 1
2017-11-30T15:25:24.194642+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to crashed
2017-11-30T15:25:24.111927+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.4.0/gems/devise-
4.3.0/lib/devise/rails/routes.rb:498:in `raise_no_secret_key': Devise.secret_key was not set. Please add the 
following to your Devise initializer: (RuntimeError)
2017-11-30T15:25:24.111943+00:00 app[web.1]: 
2017-11-30T15:25:24.111944+00:00 app[web.1]:   config.secret_key = 
'629ddf6bcfb38031083f09c518307c85f7fdda12a48939c0c7ed51ca0256790d87fa6d54ee

this after I set both RACK_ENV and RAILS_ENV to staging. Nevermind I’m probably better off using RAILS own authentication method (Which I did not know existed).

Thank you again for these forums and the tutorials from Thoughtbot. You guys rock! :smile:

Rodolphe

#4

Hello again Joel.

I actually got it to work. I added the following to secrets.yml:

staging:
  secret_key_base: <%= ENV["SECRET_KEY_BASE"] %>

Not too sure if this is best practise though?

#5

Run ‘heroku config’ in your production app so you see all the variables heroku requires, and then you can add these in the staging env config

It is a good practice to have your staging environment as a copy of production, that way you ensure you are testing against the real thing, you should consider keep your staging env that way

#6

Hello Orlando,

Thanks for your input. Indeed by adding

staging:

secret_key_base: <%= ENV[“SECRET_KEY_BASE”] %>

I have used the production config so this is as close as possible. Well I think!