Archive for the ‘Ruby on Rails Application Development’ Category

Single Sign-On In Rails Application

On August 2nd, 2015 in Gems, rails, RoR App Development, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development, Uncategorized
Single sign-on (SSO) is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them. Such as we once log in to google, we are permitted to access the Youtube, Docs, Google Drive etc. dnd1999110501 We may think about sharing the session cookies among the all domains but its generally not a good idea. One can steal cookies to sign in from other system or browser. Single SignOn Helps us in getting around this problem and implement a much robust system. How do we implement Single Sign-On in Rails App? We will try to get our hand around on how to build a prototype around a rails app to implement single sign-on. We will be looking a sample rails application powered by CASino gem Why we are using CASino ?
  1. Distributed under MIT LIcense
  2. Active Development since
  3. External authentication sources (LDAP, SQL)
  4. Two-factor authentication
  5. Session-overview for logged-in users
  6. Full localization support
  7. REST-API
So what is CASino exactly? CASino is a simple Single sign-on server application. It supports the CAS protocol and can therefore be used in combination with almost every web programming language out there. CAS is an authentication system originally created by Yale University to provide a trusted way for an application to authenticate a user. CAS centralizes authentication: It allows all your applications to ask users to login to a single sign-on server The implementation. Here we have two apps client and server. We assume that the app is using devise for the demonstration purposes. The Logic can easily be extended to other authentication methods though. The app is as simple as configuring a few variables in the CASino gem.
  1. user request to client domain .
  2. it redirects to the server if not authorised.
  3. Start with adding the gems client app
  4. redirects to back url to whichever client request url is
Step #1 Implementing the client application. Gemfile # If You face some compatability issues then use ruby 2.1 

gem 'devise_cas_authenticatable', git: '<a href="https://github.com/jpamaya/devise_cas_authenticatable">https://github.com/jpamaya/devise_cas_authenticatable</a>'
routes.rb 

devise_for :users, skip: [:sessions], controllers: { cas_sessions: 'sso_cas' }

devise_scope :user do

get "sign_in", to: "devise/cas_sessions#new"

delete "sign_out", to: "devise/cas_sessions#destroy"

end
devise.rb # ==> Configuration for SSO server authentication 

config.cas_base_url = "http://localhost:4000/"

config.cas_create_user = false

config.cas_destination_logout_param_name = 'service'

config.cas_enable_single_sign_out = true
User.rb 

devise :cas_authenticatable
Now run client application on localhost:3000 and begin with typing users/sign_in Since we overwrote devise’s sign in mechanism, so instead of presenting devise’s normal sign in page, we are redirected to localhost:4000 which is the backend app to authenticate the users. Lets prepare the backend app to authenticate the users.  Step #2 Start with implementing code in server app limitation use ruby ruby “2.1.5” and rails “3.2.11” check rails -v ‘~>(‘ 3.2.11’). for server app Gemfile #It users these db to store sessions and some tokens. casino will take care all about these 

gem 'sqlite3'   # for sqlite support

gem 'mysql2'    # for mysql support

gem 'pg'        # for postgresql support

gem 'casino'
Run bundle install and rails g casino:install The CAS configuration is stored under config/cas.yml. This is where you configure how your SSO handles logins. An example configuration can be found in the file config/cas.yml.example provide the valid db credentials and run the migrations. Run this app on localhost:4000 , Just follow the old steps
  1. Goto localhost:3000/users/sign_in
  2. You will redirected to localhost:4000 enter credentials click sign in
  3. You will be redirected back on successful login
In the links below you can find some ready made examples for you to clone these  apps and have better understanding of SSO.
Server exampleruby “2.1.5”git clone https://github.com/codescrum/casino-sso-server-example.gitRails 4 client examplegit clone https://github.com/codescrum/casino-sso-client-rails4-example.gitRails 3 client example git clone https://github.com/codescrum/casino-sso-client-rails3-example.git
Let us know in comments if you face any troubles in the implementation !! PS: Single Sign-out has been left as a thought for another day and we will discuss that in a follow up blog.

Embedly Integration in Rails

On December 6th, 2014 in Gems, RoR App Development, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development
Embedly is a powerful tool to embed multimedia content or images or even blogs in your application. It comes in handy especially to make your content easier to share.
Embedly provides an easy to use official ruby gem to integrate Embedly into your RoR app. The usage of the gem is fairly straight forward. I will try to go step by step on how to integrate embedly API into an RoR app.
  • Add the gem in your gem file 
    gem "embedly"
    Bundle the Gems
  • Get the API key from “https://app.embed.ly/login”. For the purpose of the blog we assume that the API key is accessible through the config variable AppConfig.embedly[:api_key]
  • Mostly the embeds will stay the view side logic so lets create a small helper to generate an embed from a Youtube Video. The call to the API is pretty straight forward and intuitive as we can see from the following code.
  • require 'embedly'
require 'json'def display
embedly_api =Embedly::API.new AppConfig.embedly[:api_key]
obj = embedly_api.oembed :url => 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPbJ4Z5D-n4&feature=topvideos'
obj.first.html
end
  • The code calls the embedly API to generate an ombed for the youtube url and returns the html for the embed. This html can be used directly to embed the content into your blog or app.
  • Thats it !!

Enjoy supercharged content with your app and feel free to post any comments in the comments section.

A Step by Step Guide to Setup Rails application on Ec2 instance (Ubuntu Server)

On March 24th, 2014 in Amazon EC2, mysql, Open Source, Postgres, rails, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development, RVM, Server Admin
Sometimes the Bitnami or other Rails AMIs doesn’t fit your needs directly and you will feel the need of building the Server yourself.Here I go step by step in building such a stack on top of Amaon EC2 Ubuntu Server.

  • Rails applications are a little bit different to install on servers but the process is very easy.Rails application needs a web server and an application server to run with. For development, it comes with default Webrick server that serve as application server on local machine. For setting it up on production server, we have the following choices on Web and application servers :-

    • Web servers

      1. Apache

      2. Nginx

    • Application Servers

      1. Passenger

      2. Thin

      3. Puma

      4. Unicorn

  • The simplest and best combination consists of Nginx + Passenger. It allows greater flexibility for configuration and also allows good speed over other combinations. So we are going to setup an Rails application using Nginx + passenger configuration on a bare Ubuntu server. Here are the steps :-

  1. Launch an Ec2 instance with ubuntu AMI. Make sure you have HTTP and SSH access to the server.

  2. SSH into the server by using private key (.pem) used while launching the instance and install the available updates by running :-

    sudo apt-get install updates
  3. Now you need to setup ruby on your server, so install the single user rvm ruby by following this blog.

  4. Load the rvm and make the installed ruby as default by running the following commands :-

    source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
    rvm use 2.1.0 –default

  5. Install the version control to clone your rails application to server. We generally use Git with rails application which can be installed by running the following command :-

    sudo apt-get install git

  6. Now clone your application on the server :-

    git clone yourepo.git

    Note:- In case of private git repository, you need to add public key of server to deploy keys of your repository, otherwise you will be promped with an permission denied error.

    OR

    Deploy using application to this server using Capistrano script. Please read this blog for more details on deploying your application using Capistrano.

  7. Now go to your application and install the gems by running bundle install command. If you want to setup your database on the same server, you can do the same by using the following commands 😐

    • In case of MYSQL

      sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
      sudo apt-get install libmysql++-dev

    • In case of POSTGRESQL, follow this blog for installation and then install the development headers

      sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

      After setting this up, migrate your databases in whichever environment you want to launch the server.

  8. Now install the Passenger gem by running :-

    gem install passenger

  9. Next step is to install the Nginx server, but we have some pre-requisits for this.

      1. It needs curl development headers which can be installed by :-

        sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

      2. It will be installed under /opt directory and your user should have permissions to that folder, so make your user as user owner for /opt directory by :-

        sudo chown -R ubuntu /opt

  10. Now install the Nginx server with passenger extension by running the following command :-

    passenger-install-nginx-module

  11. Set your Nginx server as service in init script by using the following commands :- 

    wget -O init-deb.sh http://library.linode.com/assets/660-init-deb.sh
sudo mv init-deb.sh /etc/init.d/nginx
sudo chmod  +x /etc/init.d/nginx
sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults

  12. Setup your application path in the nginx configuration file i.e. /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf.

    server {

    listen 80;

    server_name localhost;

    root /home/ubuntu/my_application/public #<-- be sure to point to 'public'

    passenger_enabled on;

    rails_env production;

    }

  13. Lastly start your server by running the following command :-

    sudo service nginx start

     

Braintree Integration In Rails Application

On February 8th, 2014 in Braintree, Payment Gateways, RoR App Development, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development
Braintree is one gateway that is getting a lot of traction and user love these days due to its ease of use and getting started easily. I have indicated here a few things that should get you started with braintree in rails quickly. In this Blog, we’ll securely process a credit card transaction using the official braintree gem and the Client-side encryption method, utilizing Braintree.js library. The blog covers the case where the form to accept the payments is rendered on the client side only.     Note: Before starting you’ll need to sign up for a Sandbox account. That will provide us with the required braintree API keys. There are two parts to the problem. First one is setting up the form and securing the data to be sent to the server. The next is to process the transaction the server side. Payment Form A simple payment form captures the credit card information along with amount of payment to be made. Here goes a very simple HTML form which asks for all the required info: 
</pre>
<h1>Braintree Credit Card Transaction Form</h1>
<div><form id="braintree- payment-form" action="/create_transaction" method="POST"><label>Card Number</label>
<input type="text" autocomplete="off" size="20" data-encrypted-name="number" />

<label>CVV</label>
<input type="text" autocomplete="off" size="4" data-encrypted-name="cvv" />

<label>Expiration (MM/YYYY)</label>
<input type="text" name="month" size="2" /> / <input type="text" name="year" size="4" />

<input id="submit" type="submit" /></form></div>
<pre>
Next up, we need to encrypt the payment that is being sent from client side to our server for processing. Braintree provides a nice JS library to encrypt the data that is being sent from your form. The integration is as simple as including the library and calling a do it all method. 
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://js.braintreegateway.com/v1/braintree.js"></script><script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
var braintree = Braintree.create("YourClientSideEncryptionKey"); braintree.onSubmitEncryptForm('braintree-payment-form');
// ]]></script>
As you can see, we just did couple of steps to secure the data being sent to the server.
  • We initialized the Braintree.js with client-side encryption key.
  • We then called the Braintree.js onSubmitEncryptForm method with the id of the form to encrypt the form before sending it to the server.
Thats it, your data is being securely sent to your server now for processing. Lets move on to the server side of the things. First up install the official braintree gem in your Gemfile. Setting up Rails Controller to commit a transaction with Braintree
  • Every Braintree user receives a unique set of API keys. These need to available in your application.
  • To retrieve the keys, first sign in your Sandbox account.
  • On the sandbox home page, you can get the API keys required to execute transactions with BrainTree.
  • The code will look like this(for sandbox environment)
  • 	Braintree::Configuration.environment = :sandbox
	Braintree::Configuration.merchant_id = “use_your_merchant_id”
	Braintree::Configuration.public_key = “use your public key”
	Braintree::Configuration.private_key = “use your private key”
  • Next Up, lets call up the API call to make the transaction. Braintree gem comes with exhaustive set of method calls to interact with the gateway. Here we initiate a sale with Braintree.
  • 	result = Braintree::Transaction.sale(:amount => “1000.00”,
:credit_card => {:number => params[:number], :cvv => params[:cvv], :expiration_month => params[:month], :expiration_year => params[:year]},
:options => {:submit_for_settlement => params[:settlement]})
  • Thats it !! The result object will tell us whether initiating the payment succeeded or not. The object comes loaded with methods to test the result like result.success? and result.failed?
This is not the end to the whole payment process in Braintree. Braintree will send calls/hooks informing your application about the various payment states but that is out of scope for the purpose of this blog and will better taken up as a post for separate. I hope the blog helps you get up with Braintree Quickly. Please feel free to drop in comments if any.

Uploading Files to Amazon S3 with Paperclip

On June 21st, 2013 in Gems, Paperclip, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development
Paperclip is a very basic and useful ruby gem which is used in almost every rails application. Basically it allows user to upload images and other attachments for storage and processing. Storing Files/Attachments to Amazon S3 with paperclip is rather a simple job but i will still give a dig on out just if it comes out useful to anyone. There are two parts to the uploading. First Storge, Second Retrieval. We will take them one by one: Storage:
    • Apart from uploading files to your application server, paperclip also allows you to store your files on some external storage services such as Amazon S3 so as to provide your application better scalability, reliability, and speed than just storing files on the filesystem.
    • To upload your files to amazon s3 using paperclip, We can go through the following steps(assuming that you are already using paperclip to store files to your filesystem):-
    • Add the following gems to your Gemfile (This is the gem for including the Amazon SDK support):-
       gem 'aws-s3', :require => 'aws/s3'
 gem 'aws-sdk'
    • Run the ‘bundle install’ command.
    • Lets configure the model for paperclip :-
       class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
 attr_accessible :avatar
 has_attached_file :avatar,
 :styles => { :medium => "300x300>"},
 :storage => :s3,
 :s3_credentials=>{:access_key_id=>"AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID",
 :secret_access_key => "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"},
 :s3_permissions => "public-read",
 :path => ":id",
 :bucket => "AWS_BUCKET"
 end
    • Lets deciper the parameters above :
    1. s3_credentials : Takes a path, a File, or a Hash containing the access_key_id and secret_access_key that Amazon gives you.
    2. s3_permissions: This is a String that should be one of the access policies that S3 provides. The default for Paperclip is :public_read.
    3. bucket: This is the name of the S3 bucket that will store your files. Remember that the bucket must be unique across all of Amazon S3. If the bucket does not exist Paperclip will attempt to create it.
    4. path: This is the key under the bucket in which the file will be stored. The URL will be constructed from the bucket and the path. This is what you will want to interpolate. Keys should be unique, like filenames.
Retrieval Now, the Files that have been uploaded with Paperclip are stored in S3. However, metadata such as the file’s name, location on S3, and last updated timestamp are all stored in the model’s table in the database. Paperclip provides convenience methods to access the stored objects. e.g. To access the file’s url through the url method on the model’s file attribute (avatar in this example), you can use post.avatar.url (http://bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/…) Hope the blog comes in handy for someone looking to integrate paperclip with Amazon S3 pretty quickly.

Stripe Integration with Ruby on Rails

On June 20th, 2013 in Payment Gateways, RoR App Development, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development, Stripe
Stripe is a payment gateway that is easy to set up with your ROR app. It only charges fees on a per-transaction basis and that fee is very reasonable due to which it has been gaining foot in the market and is choice for many internet based stores as a defacto payment processor. Stripe is currently only available in the United States so you’ll need an account at a U.S. bank if you want to use it in your app. In this blog we will see how one can integrate strip in an RoR app:-
  1. First of all create your account at Stripe(stripe.com)
  2. You will get stripe keys(api and publishable) after creating an account, to retrieve. Go to Your Stipe Account -> Account Settings -> API Keys and note down the keys.
  3. Now add the stripe gem in your Gemfile as
  4. gem 'stripe', :git => https://github.com/stripe/stripe-ruby
  5. Place the api key in a configuration file to use them globally. For the simplicity of the blog, I assume we have an AppConfig struct which contains the application level globals
  6. Stripe.api_key = AppConfig.stripe[:api_key]
  7. Now Create a view page which will accept the card information from the user that contains the card information like name on card, card number, card id, exp_month and exp_year.
  8. <%= content_tag :tr do %>
 <%= label_tag "Name on Card:"%>
 <% end %>
 <%= content_tag :td do%>
 <%= f.text_field :name_on_card, :required => true%>
 <% end %>
 <% end %>
 <%= content_tag :tr do%>
 <%= content_tag :td do%>
 <%= label_tag "Card Number:"%>
 <% end %>
 <%= content_tag :td do%>
 <%= f.text_field :card_number, :required => true%>
 <% end %>
 <% end %>
  9. Create a stripe token to initiate a payment process
  10. card_token = Stripe::Token.create(:card => {:number => params[:card_number], :exp_month => params[:exp_month],
:exp_year => params[:exp_year], :cvc => params[:card_id] })
  11. And then charge the card with the token obtained above. Thats it !! Isn’t it damn simple ?
  12. stripe_charge = Stripe::Charge.create(:amount => amoumt_in_cents, :currency => "usd", :card => card_token[:id],:description=> your_email_id )
  13. Stripe takes the amount in cents and your email is required to link the transaction. Now, the charge deducted from the user’s credit card will be added to your account excluding stripe charges.
  14. You can also retrieve the charge information as follows for the record purposes as:
  15. Stripe::Charge.retrieve(stripe_charge[:id])
  16. To Refund the Charge
charge = Stripe::Charge.retrieve(stripe_charge[:id])</pre>
charge.refund
Meanwhile, The Stripe API’s Documentation is available at https://stripe.com/docs/api/ruby. Important Note: Please note that blog is just meant to illustrate the usage of Stripe in an RoR app. There are many security considerations that must be taken into account while implementing a payment processor in the application. All that is topic for another day and we will suggest to research on proper security methods before implementing any payment processor in the application.

Deploying RoR Apps using Capistrano – An Introduction

On May 24th, 2013 in Continuous Integration, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development, SCM
Capistrano is a Ruby gem or we can say a set of Ruby programs that gives you a set of advanced tools to deploy web applications to web servers. In other words, Capistrano allows you to copy code from your source control repository (SVN/Git) to your server via SSH, and perform pre and post-deploy functions like restarting a web server, renaming files, running database migrations and so on. With Capistrano you can also deploy to many machines at once.
    • Capistrano offers many advanced options but for the purpose of this introductory blog, we will focus only on the essential things that need to be taken care of while deploying a simple app. We will setup a simple recipe(fancy name for capistrano scripts) for deploying a Rails application to a single server from either SVN or Git repositories. We will cover a common work flow that allows you to deploy multiple environments: in this case, staging and production.
    • This tutorial has three steps for deployment
    • Installing Capistrano
    • Configure
    • Deployment
So Let’s start with the steps:- 1. Installing Capistrano:- In order to install Capistrano you will need Ruby and RubyGems installed on your computer. Then, just open the Gemfile of your Rails application and add the following line to include the capistrano gem:- 
gem 'capistrano'
After configuring the gemfile, run ‘bundle install‘ command. 2. Configure: 2.1. Capification :- Capification refers to generating the necessary files in your Rails application needed for the deployment and this can be done by firing the following command in your rails app directory:- ubuntu:~/app_directory$ capify This command will create two files:
    • Capfile: this is the “main” file that Capistrano needs. Capistrano looks for and loads “Capfile” by default. All it does is load “config/deploy.rb”.
    • config/deploy.rb: this is the file that contains your Rails application’s deployment configuration. Rails prefers that all configuration go under the config directory, and so Capistrano tries to abide by that as much as it can by just pointing the Capfile to config/deploy.rb.
2.2. Configuration :- In general, you’ll leave the Capfile alone and do all your tweaking in config/deploy.rb. So for now just leave the Capfile and start working with the deploy.rb file. The following are the essential elements which are needed to be include for basic deployment:-
    • set :application, “App_Name” /* The name of your application to be deployed*/
    • set :repository, “repository_address” /*address of the repository where the application resides. This repository must be accessible to the server(where we are deploying) as well as the local machine*/
    • set :scm, :git /*we need to tell capistrano about which SCM we are using e.g. GIT, SVN or any other SCM. In above example we are using GIT. if we don’t write the SCM then by default it takes it as SVN. if you use username and password to access your repository then you need to mention that also by using the following two attributes also*/
    • set :scm_username, ‘your_scm_username’
    • set :scm_password, ‘your_scm_password’
    • set :deploy_to, “/data/#{application}” /*the address on the server where you want to deploy your application*/
    • set :user, “username” /*username for ssh login into remote server where you want to deploy your application*/
    • set :password, “password” /* for ssh login into remote server where you want to deploy your application. If you are not having the password you can you your public key to login into the server by giving the following option*/
    • ssh_options[:keys] = [“Your ssh key full path and name”]
    • server “abcd.com”, :app, :web, :db, :primary => true /*name or IP address of server where we want to deploy our application. But if we want to deploy the application on mltiple servers, then we need to add the following */
    • role :app, “tutorial.com”
    • role :web, “tutorial.com”
    • role :db, “tutorial.com”, :primary => true
Those three roles (app, web, and db) are the three that Capistrano needs for Rails deployment. You can always add your own roles, too, for tasks of your own, but make sure you declare at least one server in each of app, web, and db when you’re deploying Rails applications.
    • web: this is where your web server software runs. Requests from the web go straight here. For sites with lots of traffic, you might have two or three (or more!) web servers running behind a load balancer.
    • app: this is where your application layer runs. You might need only a single web server, and have it send requests to any of four or five different app servers, via a load balancer.
    • db: this is where migrations are run. Some prefer not to actually run code on the server where the database lives, so you can just set this to one of the app servers if you prefer. Capistrano will deploy your application to servers in this role. The “:primary => true” bit just says that this is our “primary” database server—you can have as many as you want (for database slaves and so forth), but Capistrano will only run migrations on the one you designate as “primary”.
The addresses you place in each role are the addresses that Capistrano will SSH to, in order to execute the commands you give. By using these parameters one can easily deploy a simple app to server. And there are some parameter which gives you additional options like:
  • use_sudo: Defines for the default Rails deployment recipes whether we want to use sudo or not. Sudo is a unix tool for executing commands as the root_user . To use it, your user must have passwordless sudo access enabled. If you’re using shared hosting where sudo access may not be enabled for your user, you should set :use_sudo to false. In general, if you can get away without using sudo, you should avoid it.
  • keep_releases: The number of old releases to keep, defaults to 5, can be overridden with any positive integer, negative values will produce undefined behavior. 0 means zero.
  • git_enable_submodules: If you’re using git submodules you must tell cap to fetch them or not. You can set its value 1 to include it and 0 to not include it.
  • branch:- You need to tell cap the branch to checkout during deployment. For example we have two branches i.e master and production and you want to check out from master branch, then you will be write it as: set :branch, “master”
  • deploy_via:- This option is used to tell capistrano that which deployment strategy we are using for deployment. There are various options available with deploy_via and we can chose between them as our convenience.
  • :checkout will do a full SCM checkout.
  • :copy will checkout locally, then tar and gzip the copy and sftp it to the remote servers.
  • :remote_cache will keep a local git repo on the server you’re deploying to and simply run a fetch from that rather than an entire clone. This is probably the best option as it will only fetch the changes since the last deploy.
  • Deployment Everything is ready to try our recipe for the first time and let Capistrano create the initial directory structure on your server for future deployments. Run the following command from the root directory of your application:
  • cap deploy:setup cap deploy:setup
  • When you run this command, Capistrano will SSH to your server, enter the directory that you specified in the deploy_to variable, and create a special directory structure that’s required for Capistrano to work properly. If something is wrong with the permissions or SSH access, you will get error messages. Look closely at the output Capistrano gives you while the command is running. The last step before we can do an actual deployment with Capistrano is to make sure that everything is set up correctly on the server from the setup command. There’s a simple way to verify, with the command: cap deploy:check cap deploy:check This command will check your local environment and your server and locate likely problems. If you see any error messages, fix them and run the command again. Once you can run without errors, you can proceed!Once you’ve verified your local and server configuration, run the following command: cap production deploy:migrations This command just log in to production and deploy the latest code from the master branch and run all the pending migrations. cap deploy This will perform a deployment to your default stage, which is staging. If you want to deploy to production, you’d run the following: cap production deploy production deploy While these commands are performed, you will see a lot of output. Capistrano print all commands it runs on your server as well as their output, making it possible for you to debug any problems. Enjoy the dynamic deployments using capistrano !!

Resources Controller for RoR Applications

On September 17th, 2012 in RoR App Development, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Application Development
Rails has one basic and most important principle to keep its code DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) which means writing same code again and again is a bad thing. But in every rails application, we can often see similar CRUD actions in every controller which violates the DRY principle of Rails. To avoid such kind of duplicacy, we can club the standard CRUD actions at one place. Resources Controller is a plugin to facilitate this approach and to keep your controllers DRY. It introduces some abstraction to help you override the default RESTful functionality in a clean and simple manner. How to use:-
  • To use Resources Controller, firstly you need to download it from https://github.com/ianwhite/resources_controller and keep it in vendor/plugin folder of your Rails application.
  • In every controller of your application which needs to get this nifty functionality, you just add resource_controller_for line in the controller. 
     class PostsController < ApplicationController
       resources_controller_for :posts
   end
    now your posts controller will get all standard CRUD actions, views will get instance variable (i.e. @post or @posts).
  • Here are some general methods of Resources Controller which can be used in your controller for convenience and for making your code RESTful.
  • enclosing_resources: returns array of resources which are nested in that controller.
  • resource_class : returns class of controller’s resource.
  • find_resources: returns collection or array of resources (commonly used in index).
  • find_resource : returns the resource using id from params (commonly used in show, edit, update & destroy).
  • new_resource : initializes a resource of controller’s resource class (commonly used in new).
  • save_resource : saves the newly created or updated resource (commonly used in create).
  • resource : returns the controller’s current resource.
If you want to add some extra functionality into your actions, you can write that action in your controller. Now your newly written action will override the standard action defined in Resources Controller. Isn’t it the Rails DRYness at its best !!