During the Ruby on Rails tutorial, I encountered several errors during Chapter 8. Luckily, I solved quite a few of them and learnt a few things about debugging along the way.
Problem: Cannot create users
The first thing that caught me was the error regarding creation of users. I could not create the user.
Code: app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb
def create
user = User.find_by_email(params[:session][:email])
if user && user.authenticate(params[:session][:password])
sign_in user
redirect_to user
else
flash.now[:error] = 'Invalid email/password combination' # Not quite right!
render 'new'
end
Reading the logs, I saw this message on the line where "find_by_email" is called. I was extremely puzzled as to why this message occurred.
Error message:
SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."email" = NULL LIMIT 1
Why it happened:
You can't access the values of "email" and "password" through params[:session][:email].
The sessions hash looks like:
utf8: ✓
authenticity_token: 1D72gydJcrOzGslhOnfAotmkEUtghtQmOhEZRQGWpiw=
sessions: !ruby/hash:ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess
email: 'user@example.com'
password: 'foobar'
Solution:
You can access the email and password values of the params through 2 methods:
params["sessions"]["email"]
params[:email]
Updated code:
def create
user = User.find_by_email(params["sessions"]["email"])
if user && user.authenticate(params["session"]["password"])
sign_in user
redirect_to user
else
flash.now[:error] = 'Invalid email/password combination' # Not quite right!
render 'new'
end
Problem: Cannot authenticate users in authentication_pages_spec.rb
As Postgresql is case-sensitive, we need to make sure the emails are downcased.
before do
fill_in "Email", with: user.email.downcase
fill_in "Password", with: user.password
click_button "Sign in"
save_and_open_page # useful to see the page that is generated
end
The original code was
user.email.upcase
