User Authentication

Blacklight does not require user authentication, however, if included, Blacklight can provide additional features for users (Bookmarks, Saved Searches, etc). Because of the wide range of institutional needs and capabilities, Blacklight does not require a specific user authentication provider.

Installing with Devise

If you are rolling your own user authentication system, we highly recommend Devise, an extremely flexible authentication solution that is relatively straightforward. For directions to install the Blacklight gem using devise, see the Quickstart.

Install and Use (with a custom user authentication system)

Create a new rails 3 application

$ rails new my_app

Add blacklight to your gem file

edit ./my_app/Gemfile

# Append this line to the end of the file:
gem 'blackight'

$ bundle install

If you have a User model already, the Blacklight generator will connect to it automatically during installation. However, you will need to make sure the following named routes are included in your /config/routes.rb file:

  match 'your_login',          :to => 'Your User Session Controller # Log in action',       :as => 'new_user_session'
  match 'your_logout',         :to => 'Your User Session Controller # Log Out action',      :as => 'destroy_user_session'
  match 'your_account_page',   :to => 'Your User Session Controller # Account edit action', :as => 'edit_user_registration'

One blacklight view partial uses #to_s on your user model to get a user-displayable account name/identifier for the currently logged in account, so you probably want to have such a method.

Finally, you will need to make sure the following methods are available both on controllers and as helpers:

• current_user - Which should return a user object that include Blacklight::User
• user_session - Which are included in your /config/routes.rb file:

Once these are in place, you can run the Blacklight Installation Generator:

$ rails generate blacklight [MODEL NAME]

Where model name is the name of your user model.

Execute your migrations, and you should be good to go.

$ rake db:migrate

If you need to install Solr or the sample data, follow the directions from the see the Quickstart.