OmniAuth

Objectives

1. Describe the problem of authentication and how OmniAuth solves it.
2. Explain an OmniAuth strategy.
3. Use OmniAuth to handle authentication in a Rails server.

There are no tests for this lesson, but code along as we learn about OmniAuth and build out a login strategy together!

NOTE: If you run into trouble with Facebook, use the usual avenues for assistance (Google, StackOverflow, AAQ, Slack, and so on), but don't bash your head against the wall too much. Facebook is the choice for this lesson because it is ubiquitous as an OAuth provider, but feel free to pick a different provider (GitHub, for instance). A bit of struggle in the setup process is healthy — that's a learning opportunity. However, the ultimate point of this lesson is to learn how to use OmniAuth; not to waste six hours fighting with the Facebook developer interface.

Overview

Passwords are terrible.

For one thing, you have to remember them. Or you have to use a password manager, which comes with its own problems. Unsurprisingly, some percentage of users will just leave and never come back the moment you ask them to create an account.

And then on the server, you have to manage all these passwords. You have to store them securely. Rails secures your passwords when they are stored in your database, but it does not secure your servers, which see the password in plain text. If I can get into your servers, I can edit your Rails code and have it send all your users' passwords to me as they submit them. You'll also have to handle password changes, email verification, and password recovery. Inevitably, your users accounts will get broken into. This may or may not be your fault, but, when they write to you, it will be your problem.

What if it could be someone else's problem?

Like Google, for example. They are dealing with all these problems somehow (having a huge amount of money helps). For example, when you log into Google, they are looking at vastly more than your username and password. Google considers where you are in the world (they can guess based on your IP address), the operating system you're running (their servers can tell because they listen very carefully to your computer's accent when it talks to them), and numerous other factors. If the login looks suspicious — for instance, you usually log in on a Mac in New York, but today you're logging in on a Windows XP machine in Thailand — they may reject it or ask you to solve a CAPTCHA.

Wouldn't it be nice if your users could use their Google — or Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, etc. — login for your site?

Of course, you know this is possible. It's becoming increasingly rare to find a modern website that doesn't allow users to login via a third-party account. Today, we're going to talk about how to add this feature to your Rails applications.

OmniAuth

OmniAuth is a gem for Rails that lets you use multiple authentication providers alongside the more traditional username/password setup. 'Provider' is the most common term for an authentication partner, but within the OmniAuth universe we refer to providers (e.g., using a Facebook account to log in) as strategies. The OmniAuth wiki keeps an up-to-date list of strategies, both official (provided directly by the service, such as GitHub, Heroku, and SoundCloud) and unofficial (maintained by an unaffiliated developer, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter).

Here's how OmniAuth works from the user's standpoint:

1. User tries to access a page on yoursite.com that requires them to be logged in. They are redirected to the login screen.
2. The login screen offers the options of creating an account or logging in with Google or Twitter.
3. The user clicks Log in with Google. This momentarily sends the user to yoursite.com/auth/google, which quickly redirects to the Google sign-in page.
4. If the user is not already signed in to Google, they sign in normally. More likely, they are already signed in, so Google simply asks if it's okay to let yoursite.com access the user's information. The user agrees.
5. They are (hopefully quickly) redirected to yoursite.com/auth/google/callback and, from there, to the page they initially tried to access.

Let's see how this works in practice.

OmniAuth with Facebook

The OmniAuth gem allows us to use the OAuth protocol with a number of different providers. All we need to do is add the OmniAuth gem and the provider-specific OmniAuth gem (e.g., omniauth-google) to our Gemfile. In some cases, adding only the provider-specific gem will suffice because it will install the OmniAuth gem as a dependency, but it's safer to add both — the shortcut is far from universal.

In this case, let's add omniauth and omniauth-facebook to the Gemfile. Due to recent changes to the omniauth gem we need to add one additional gem to our Gemfile: omniauth-rails_csrf_protection. Once you've added all three gems, run bundle install. If we were so inclined, we could add additional OmniAuth gems to our heart's content, offering login via multiple providers in our app.

Note: If running bundle install gives you an error with installing thin, run the following:

gem install thin -- --with-cflags="-Wno-error=implicit-function-declaration"

Next, we'll need to tell OmniAuth about our app's OAuth credentials. Create a file named config/initializers/omniauth.rb. It will contain the following lines:

Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do
  provider :facebook, ENV['FACEBOOK_KEY'], ENV['FACEBOOK_SECRET']
end

The code is unfamiliar, but we can guess what's going on from the characteristically clear Rails syntax. We're telling our Rails app to use a piece of middleware created by OmniAuth for the Facebook authentication strategy.

ENV

The ENV constant refers to a global hash for your entire computer environment. You can store any key-value pairs in this hash, so it's a very useful place to keep credentials that we don't want to be managed by Git or displayed on GitHub (especially if your GitHub repo is public). The most common error students run into is that when ENV["PROVIDER_KEY"] is evaluated in the OmniAuth initializer it returns nil. Later attempts to authenticate with the provider will cause some kind of 4xx error because the provider doesn't recognize the app's credentials (because they're evaluating to nil).

As you can gather from the initializer code, we're going to need two pieces of information from Facebook in order to get authentication working: the application key and secret that will identify our app to Facebook.

Log in to the Facebook developer site. In the My Apps dropdown menu at the top-right of the page, select Create App, and a modal should appear. Fill out the requested information and click Create App ID. Click Skip at the bottom of the Select a Scenario page. You should now be on the Dashboard. Scroll down to the Add a Product section and click Set Up on the Facebook Login tile:

Choose the Web option, and enter https://localhost:3000/ when it prompts you for your Site URL. Click Save, and then click on Settings under the Facebook Login heading in the sidebar:

In the Valid OAuth redirect URIs field, enter https://localhost:3000/auth/facebook/callback, which is the default callback endpoint for the omniauth-facebook strategy:

(Note: as of March 2018, Facebook requires https URIs for redirects. Make sure to prepend your Valid OAuth Redirect URIs with https.)

Click Save Changes, and then click on Dashboard in the sidebar. Click on Settings and then Basic. Keep the page handy because we'll need those App ID and App Secret values in a minute, but first...

dotenv-rails

Instead of setting environment variables directly in our local ENV hash, we're going to let an awesome gem handle the hard work for us. dotenv-rails is one of the best ways to ensure that environment variables are correctly loaded into the ENV hash in a secure manner. Using it requires four steps:

1. Add dotenv-rails to your Gemfile and bundle install.
2. Create a file named .env at the root of your application (in this case, inside the omniauth_readme/ directory).
3. Add your Facebook app credentials to the newly created .env file
4. Add .env to your .gitignore file to ensure that you don't accidentally commit your precious credentials.

For step three, take the App ID and App Secret values from the Facebook app dashboard...

...and paste them into the .env file as follows:

FACEBOOK_KEY=247632982388118
FACEBOOK_SECRET=01ab234567890c123d456ef78babc901

Routing OAuth flow in your application

We now need to create a link that will initiate the Facebook OAuth process. The standard OmniAuth path is /auth/:provider, so, in this case, we'll need a link to /auth/facebook. Let's add one to app/views/welcome/home.html.erb:

<%= link_to('Log in with Facebook!', '/auth/facebook', method: :post) %>

Next, we're going to need a User model and a SessionsController to track users who log in via Facebook. The User model should have four attributes, all strings: name, email, image, and uid (the user's ID on Facebook).

To handle user sessions, we need to create a single route, sessions#create, which is where Facebook will redirect users in the callback phase of the login process. Add the following to config/routes.rb:

get '/auth/facebook/callback' => 'sessions#create'

Our SessionsController will be pretty simplistic, with a lone action (and a helper method to DRY up our code a bit):

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def create
    @user = User.find_or_create_by(uid: auth['uid']) do |u|
      u.name = auth['info']['name']
      u.email = auth['info']['email']
      u.image = auth['info']['image']
    end

    session[:user_id] = @user.id

    render 'welcome/home'
  end

  private

  def auth
    request.env['omniauth.auth']
  end
end

And, finally, since we're re-rendering the welcome#home view upon logging in via Facebook, let's add a control flow to display user data if the user is logged in and the login link otherwise:

<% if session[:user_id] %>
  <h1><%= @user.name %></h1>
  <h2>Email: <%= @user.email %></h2>
  <h2>Facebook UID: <%= @user.uid %></h2>
  <img src="<%= @user.image %>">
<% else %>
  <%= link_to('Log in with Facebook!', '/auth/facebook', method: :post) %>
<% end %>

Now it's time to test it out! It's best to log out of Facebook prior to clicking the login link — that way, you'll see the full login flow.

In order to ensure Rails is using https, do the following to start the server instead of our normal rails s flow:

thin start --ssl

Note: In the application.rb file, there is a line with config.force_ssl = true, which forces all access to the app over SSL, uses Strict-Transport-Security, and uses secure cookies. This line has been commented out so that the lab may work properly, and not cause students to get hung up on debugging and having issues with other labs. Chrome would cache the HTTPS protocol for the localhost domain, and only clearing the cache would work. However, in practice, it is still recommended to use ssl in OmniAuth applications.

A man, a plan, a param, Panama

Upon clicking the link, your browser sends a GET request to the /auth/facebook route, which OmniAuth intercepts and redirects to a Facebook login screen with a ridiculously long URI: https://www.facebook.com/login.php?skip_api_login=1&api_key=247632982388118&signed_next=1&next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fv2.9%2Fdialog%2Foauth%3Fredirect_uri%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flocalhost%253A3000%252Fauth%252Ffacebook%252Fcallback%26state%3Df4033bf06e2c3d74f1e65367e9c1651e2bde5487d5a7ca8d%26scope%3Demail%26response_type%3Dcode%26client_id%3D247632982388118%26ret%3Dlogin%26logger_id%3Dd31c6728-d017-cee3-503d-5fe1bb6d8ad3&cancel_url=http%3A%2F%2Flocalhost%3A3000%2Fauth%2Ffacebook%2Fcallback%3Ferror%3Daccess_denied%26error_code%3D200%26error_description%3DPermissions%2Berror%26error_reason%3Duser_denied%26state%3Df4033bf06e2c3d74f1e65367e9c1651e2bde5487d5a7ca8d%23_%3D_&display=page&locale=en_US&logger_id=d31c6728-d017-cee3-503d-5fe1bb6d8ad3. The URI has a ton of encoded parameters, but we can parse through them to get an idea of what's actually being communicated.

Right away, we see our Facebook application key, api_key=247632982388118, and the Facebook API endpoint that the login flow will send us to next: next=https://www.facebook.com/v2.9/dialog/oauth. At that point, there are divergent paths, one for successful login:

• redirect_uri=https://localhost:3000/auth/facebook/callback — If login succeeds, we'll be redirected to our server's OmniAuth callback route.

• scope=email — This tells Facebook that we want to receive the user's registered email address in the login response. We didn't have to configure anything (scope=email is the default), but if you want to request other specific pieces of user data check out the omniauth-facebook documentation.
• client_id=247632982388118 — There's our application key again, this time provided to the success callback.

And one for failure:

• cancel_url=https://localhost:3000/auth/facebook/callback — If login fails, we'll also be redirected to our server's OmniAuth callback route. However, this time there are some nested encoded parameters that provide information about the failure:
  • error=access_denied
  • error_code=200
  • error_description=Permissions error
  • error_reason=user_denied

Inspecting the returned authentication data

If you want to inspect the exact information that Facebook returns to our application about a logged-in user, throw a binding.pry in the SessionsController#create method and call auth inside the Pry session:

     2: def create
     3:   @user = User.find_or_create_by(uid: auth['uid']) do |u|
     4:     u.name = auth['info']['name']
     5:     u.email = auth['info']['email']
     6:     u.image = auth['info']['image']
     7:   end
     8:
 =>  9:   binding.pry
    10:
    11:   session[:user_id] = @user.id
    12:
    13:   render 'welcome/home'
    14: end

[1] pry(#<SessionsController>)> auth
=> {"provider"=>"facebook",
 "uid"=>"123456789012345",
 "info"=>
  {"email"=>"[email protected]",
   "name"=>"Mary Poppins",
   "image"=>"http://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/123456789012345/picture"},
 "credentials"=>
  {"token"=>
    "ABCDaEFbcGHIJKLMNdlOPeQRfSTUVWgXf1hYiZAjBkClDEmFG234n5oH6p7IJqKr0stLMNuOPQRv86S47TUVWX1YZwABCDxyz2EabcdFGeH4IfgJK9hLi0jM1kNOPQlRmn1oSTUp5qr7VWstuXvYZwxAByza807CbD9c3defEFGghijkHIJK",
   "expires_at"=>1503263133,
   "expires"=>true},
 "extra"=>
  {"raw_info"=>
    {"name"=>"Mary Poppins",
     "email"=>"[email protected]",
     "id"=>"123456789012345"}}}

When you make a server-side API call (as we did), Facebook will provide an access token that's good for about two months, so you don't have to bug your users very often. That's good!

Conclusion

Implementing the OAuth protocol yourself is extremely complicated. Using the OmniAuth gem along with any omniauth-provider gem(s) streamlines the process, allowing users to log in to your site easily. However, it still trips a lot of people up! Make sure you understand each piece of the flow, what you expect to happen, and any deviation from the expected result. The end result should be gaining access to the user's data from the provider in your SessionsController, where you can then decide what to do with it. Typically, if a matching User exists in your database, the client will be logged in to your application. If no match is found, a new User will be created using the data received from the provider.