Authentication in Ruby On Rails for both Web & API

Question

I need to develop an application which needs to authenticate user by verifying login name/password for both web access and API. I need the same controller to cater to both web and API. I can put the before_filter for the controller to make sure that user is logged-in and user_id is in session. But how do I design the controller that if the request comes as a rest web service request then before filter should not check session for logged user but should authenticate with login/password passed as parameters with request and then should go ahead whichever way the request came to controller.

I would really appreciate any code samples/links to sites which explain how to do that.

Answer 1

AWS API requests do this thing where you establish a connection using the two keys (access and secret) and get a token to use for the rest of your API accesses (I’m pretty sure this times out eventually).