Modeling Users

In Chapter 5, we ended with a stub page for creating new users (Section 5.4); over the course of the next four chapters, we’ll fulfill the promise implicit in this incipient signup page. The first critical step is to create a data model for users of our site, together with a way to store that data. In Chapter 7, we’ll give users the ability to sign up for our site and create a user profile page. Once users can sign up, we’ll let them sign in and sign out as well (Chapter 8), and in Chapter 9 (Section 9.2.1) we’ll learn how to protect pages from improper access. Taken together, the material in Chapter 6 through Chapter 9 develops a full Rails login and authentication system. As you may know, there are various pre-built authentication solutions for Rails; Box 6.1 explains why, at least at first, it’s probably a better idea to roll your own.

                             This is a long and action-packed chapter, and you may find it unusually challenging, especially if you are new to data modeling. By the end of it, though, we will have created an industrial-strength system for validating, storing, and retrieving user information.

As usual, if you’re following along using Git for version control, now would be a good time to make a topic branch for modeling users:

(The first line here is just to make sure that you start on the master branch, so that the modeling-users topic branch is based on master. You can skip that command if you’re already on the master branch.)