CanCanCan – Continuation of CanCan, the authorization Gem for Ruby on Rails. | Hacker News Reader

CanCanCan – Continuation of CanCan, the authorization Gem for Ruby on Rails.

github.com

49 pointsrickcarlino16 comments

Kudos on picking up and moving forward an existing Rails plugin gem rather than writing yet another. Too many Rails gems get left in the dust after a few years. CanCan is a great library, and is well-documented!

That being said, I've found (the hard way) that how CanCan declares "abilities" isn't flexible enough. The declarations got out of hand as my app grew larger and the maze of who can do what got more complex.

CanCan tries to reduce complex authorization logic down to a very simple DSL. I applaud the effort, but it falls apart on larger apps.

(I am perfectly willing to admit that I probably just "did it wrong", but in the end, I decided something less clever and more along the lines of "just Ruby" would be more up my alley.)

I've switched over to using the Authority gem [1] for authorization, which doesn't try to be quite so clever. You write your authorization logic in plain ol' Ruby code -- use an `if` or a `case` or look up in the database, or whatever!

The best part of CanCan (IMO) is its ability to load and authorize your resource model in a filter in your controller, removing much of the boilerplate you get with Rails resource controllers. I would hope that functionality could be extracted from CanCan (or CanCanCan) into a separate gem.

In the meantime, I ended up writing my own library called (unimaginatively) "load_and_authorize_resource" [2] to do basically the same thing. Feedback (and PRs) welcome.

[1] https://github.com/nathanl/authority [2] https://github.com/seven1m/load_and_authorize_resource

Haven't heard of authority before, thanks for the link. I've been using Pundit [1] for similar problems; assuming you're aware of both projects, were there any specific issues that caused you to go with authority over Pundit?

[1] https://github.com/elabs/pundit

can you share an example of code that you had issues expressing with CanCan?

There's also `authorize`, `pundit` and many more:

https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_authorization

Can we still use it outside of rails? We've had success in the past using CanCan in sinatra apps.

Thanks for not allowing cancan to die.

[Six](https://github.com/randx/six) is typically my go to library. I really prefer something to just store rules, and six does just that. No fancy dsl, no integration with Rails, etc.

A new name might be a better idea. Otherwise the next person will make CanCanCanCan, which is actually a legitimate english sentence.

anyone knows why cancan development was stopped?

The author, Ryan Bates, has been on hiatus for a while now due to burn out. He seems to have stopped his open source work in addition his Railscasts screencasts.

And his social media presence. Ryan is great and burn out is a serious matter. Hope he comes back stronger and more inspired.

I wouldn't hold my breath. The worst thing you can do after something like that is going back to the old way of working. It's not like you steel yourself by going through such a phase.

There's been a couple of victims of this - notably Mark Pilgrim.

I'd like to see them both talk about what happened so that we can prevent this as a community.

Why not hand it off to another developer?

Caveat: I didn't write this, folks. I just really liked CanCan and was happy to see it be maintained.

Here's a blogpost by the new maintainer: https://mojolingo.com/blog/2014/putting-the-can-in-cancan/

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