Codeword

A simple gem to more elegantly place a staging server or other in-progress Ruby on Rails application behind a basic codeword. It’s easy to implement, share with clients/collaborators, and more beautiful than the typical password-protection sheet.

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'codeword'

Define a codeword (see Usage below).
Mount the engine in your application’s routes file (usually first, for best results):

mount Codeword::Engine, at: '/codeword'

Usage

To set a codeword, define CODEWORD in your environments/your_environment.rb file like so:

ENV['CODEWORD'] = 'secret'

If you think you might need a hint:

ENV['CODEWORD_HINT'] = 'Something that you do not tell everyone.'

If you’re using Rails >= 4.1 or Rails >= 5.2, you can add your Codeword Codeword via Rails Secrets or Rails Credentials functionality in your secrets.yml or credentials.yml.enc file, respectively:

codeword: 'love'
codeword_hint: 'Pepé Le Pew'

Alternately, Rails Credentials in >= 5.2 may be organized under the codeword namespace:

codeword:
  codeword: 'love'
  hint: 'Pepé Le Pew'

If you’re using Figaro, set your Codeword codeword and hint (optional) in your application.yml file:

codeword: 'love'
codeword_hint: 'Pepé Le Pew'

Codewords are not case-sensitive, by design. Keep it simple.

Advanced Usage

Use Codeword around a specific controller:

Follow the installation instructions above.
In your application_controller.rb file, add:

skip_before_action :check_for_codeword, raise: false

In the controller(s) you would like to restrict:

before_action :check_for_codeword

Link it with no typing:

http://somedomain.com/or_path/?codeword=love

The visitor is redirected and the cookie is set without them ever seeing the Codeword splash page.

(Codeword also makes a rudimentary attempt based on user agent to block major search engine bots/crawlers from following this link and indexing the site, just in case it ever gets out into the wild.)

Set a custom lifetime for cookie

The cookie set by Codeword defaults to 5 years. If you want to set a shorter amount of time, you can specify a number of weeks:

ENV['COOKIE_LIFETIME_IN_WEEKS'] = 4

cookie_lifetime_in_weeks: 4

Design Customization

If you would like to change the content or design of the codeword page, you can create the directories app/views/layouts/codeword and app/views/codeword/codeword and populate them with the default content from here, and then customize as desired.

Development

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Acknowledgements

Codeword is a fork of lockup.

dankimio/codeword