Today I needed to add authorisation of specific routes to my sinatra application. After having a look around I couldn’t find anything I really liked. So I sat down and did the same thing any self respecting developer would – and wrote one myself.

I was actually surprised how easy it was and the result is simple-authorisation (gem install simple-authorisation).

To include this in your app simply:

  require 'simple-authorisation'

And then in your sinatra config:

  configure do
    Simple::Authorisation.route '/', :deny => ['?'], :allow => ['*']
    Simple::Authorisation.route '/login', :allow => ['?']
    Simple::Authorisation.route '/logout', :allow => ['?']
    Simple::Authorisation.route '/admin', :allow => ['*'], :deny => ['?']
  end

Adding configuration for a route / will actually apply it to all its child routes. Adding additional routes will overwrite that setting. ‘?’ means anonymous users and ‘*’ means any logged in user.

The last thing you need to do is add a current_user method to your application:

  class Application < Sinatra::Application
    def current_user
      session[:user]
    end
  end

Now simple-authorisation knows how to get the current user it can do its thing!

I know this is very basic but so far it is all I need. The next thing to add will be specific user groups.

If you like the look of this and have something to add then please fork this on github.