Session handling in Ruby on Rails - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Session Handling in Rails

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple login system for a website using Ruby on Rails. You want to remember which user is logged in by using sessions.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic session handling system in Rails that stores a user's ID in the session when they log in and clears it when they log out.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a controller with a login action that sets the session user ID

Create a variable to hold a fixed user ID for login simulation

Use session hash to store and clear the user ID

Add a logout action that clears the session user ID

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Session handling is essential for user login systems on websites to remember who is logged in.

💼 Career

Understanding session management is a key skill for web developers working with Rails or any web framework.

1

Create a SessionsController with a login action

Create a controller called SessionsController with a method login that sets a session key :user_id to 1.

Ruby on Rails

# Create SessionsController with login method
class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  # Your code here
end

Need a hint?

Use session[:user_id] = 1 inside the login method to store the user ID.

2

Add a fixed user ID variable for login simulation

Inside the SessionsController, create a private method called fixed_user_id that returns 1. Then update the login method to set session[:user_id] to the value returned by fixed_user_id.

Ruby on Rails

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def login
    # Your code here
  end

  # Your code here
end

Need a hint?

Define a private method fixed_user_id that returns 1. Use it in login to set the session.

3

Add a logout action to clear the session user ID

Add a method logout in SessionsController that removes the :user_id key from the session by setting session[:user_id] = nil.

Ruby on Rails

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def login
    session[:user_id] = fixed_user_id
  end

  def logout
    # Your code here
  end

  private

  def fixed_user_id
    1
  end
end

Need a hint?

Set session[:user_id] = nil inside the logout method to clear the session.

4

Add routes for login and logout actions

In the config/routes.rb file, add routes for login and logout actions in SessionsController using get method. Use get '/login', to: 'sessions#login' and get '/logout', to: 'sessions#logout'.

Ruby on Rails

# Add routes for login and logout
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use get '/login', to: 'sessions#login' and get '/logout', to: 'sessions#logout' in routes.rb.