Rails Api Authentication vs User Authentication

Question

I am using rails 4 and developing my first API. The API will be used solely for our android and ios apps to communicate with the rails app / database.

I am struggling to see the difference between API authentication and user authentication when it comes to an API. It seems people use these terms interchangeably.

I want my api to be secure, meaning only the apps can submit http requests, but I also want users to be able to log in. And when I say users, I mean app users... not outside clients who are accessing our api (we don't want this at all).

Would love if someone could clear this up for me. I may just not be thinking about it in the right way, therefore confusing myself.

So to break it down, these are the two things I need to be able to do:

secure the api of course... making it so only the mobile apps can access it
users are able to log in and access their profile, resources that belongs_to to them, etc. When users aren't logged in, they still need to be able to see the index and other pages that don't require a logged in user.

thx!

Mateus Luiz · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-23 14:12:18Z

1

Have you heard of JWT? It's a good option to hadle users with the app and rails api separated.

Gem for jwt in rails: https://github.com/nsarno/knock

answered Aug 23, 2017 at 14:12

Mateus Luiz

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