Rails%203%20In%20Action

352 CHAPTER 13 Designing an API
RSpec.configure do |c|
c.include ApiHelper, :type => :api
end
Here you define a module called ApiHelper, which you include into any test marked
as an API test with the :type option. Inside the module, you use the
Rack::Test::Methods module, which provides useful methods that you’ll see
throughout this chapter for making requests to your application, such as the get
method (not yet shown). You define the app method here so that the
Rack::Test::Methods knows which application to act on. With this done, let’s go
back to your test.
Inside the describe block underneath this new method you’re going to want to
create a new user (an admin one at that, because later on you’ll need it for the create
and other actions) whom you’ll use to make this request to the API. You can create this
admin by adding a let inside spec/v1/api/projects_spec.rb:
let(:user) { create_user! }
You’ll need to set up Devise to include the token_authenticatable module so that
you can authenticate API requests from users by using a token they provide with each
request. This is so that you will know what projects to show to your users, as well as any
other authorization criteria that you need to apply to this user’s request. For example,
only users with permission to create projects in the application should be able to do so
through the API.
To implement the change that you need, go into the User model (app/models/
user.rb) and change the devise call to be this:
devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable, :confirmable,
:recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable,
:token_authenticatable
Next, generate a migration to add a field called authentication_token to the users
table, which will be used to store this token. You’ll need to add this migration to both
the development and test environments. To do this, run these three commands:
rails g migration add_authentication_token_to_users
➥authentication_token:string
rake db:migrate
rake db:test:prepare
The migration generator is smart here and will know to add the
authentication_token to the users table based on the name you’re passing through.
The additional argument on the end tells Rails what type of field you’d like this to be.
With the migration created and run, you still need to add a callback to your User
model, so that tokens are generated for users when they’re created, or for when users
are updated but don’t have a token. 7 To do this, you’ll put this line in your User model:
before_save :ensure_authentication_token
7 A situation that is unlikely to happen (as you’ve got no serious users currently), but could potentially happen.