Client Manager is a mountable Rails (engine) gem that helps identify and authenticate your API clients.
Motivation:
To understand why this gem exists, let's look at a simple example of a blog application built with a Rails API and any JavaScript front-end framework. In the API, you're probably going to have some endpoints that only logged in Users/Authors can access. Like creating or deleting a blog post. Other endpoints, however, like reading posts, will be unauthenticated. This means that if one should go to the read endpoint using a browser, the whole JSON response will be displayed. What would be ideal, would be make it such that only the front-end application can access the read endpoint(s).
Typically to do this, you might generate a random UUID and ask the front-end developer to put it in the header of their requests. But this doesn't scale well. What if you want to add an Android app? Or an iOS one too? That's where Client Manager comes in. It helps you easily manage all of this with a simple User Interface. With Client Manager, you can:
Create clients with an automatically generated JSON Web Token, which can be used to authenticate requests
Create users with the ability to create (a specified number of) clients themselves
Motivation:
To understand why this gem exists, let's look at a simple example of a blog application built with a Rails API and any JavaScript front-end framework. In the API, you're probably going to have some endpoints that only logged in Users/Authors can access. Like creating or deleting a blog post. Other endpoints, however, like reading posts, will be unauthenticated. This means that if one should go to the read endpoint using a browser, the whole JSON response will be displayed. What would be ideal, would be make it such that only the front-end application can access the read endpoint(s).
Typically to do this, you might generate a random UUID and ask the front-end developer to put it in the header of their requests. But this doesn't scale well. What if you want to add an Android app? Or an iOS one too? That's where Client Manager comes in. It helps you easily manage all of this with a simple User Interface. With Client Manager, you can:
Create clients with an automatically generated JSON Web Token, which can be used to authenticate requests Create users with the ability to create (a specified number of) clients themselves