Allow quick sign in for acceptance tests

[aaronrenner]

When I'm working in Ruby, I really enjoy how Clearance's Backdoor Middleware allows me to skip the sign in process when writing browser-level acceptance tests. When in my test environment, I can append the as query string parameter when I make a request, and I'm automatically signed in as that user. (Here's how I'd make the request using Hound).

navigate_to "/?as=#{user.id}"

What would you think about guardian having a middleware that allows developers to be able to skip the sign in process during acceptance tests? To enable this, I was thinking they might add the following to their web/router.ex file.

pipeline :browser_session do
  if Mix.env == :test do
    plug Guardian.Plug.Backdoor
  end

  plug Guardian.Plug.VerifySession
  plug Guardian.Plug.LoadResource
end

I'd be happy to work on this and I'm still thinking over the implementation details, but I wanted to run it by you before I start.

[hassox]

Putting the value into the session is a bit of a pain. A backdoor would be awesome :D

[aaronrenner]

I've got a proof of concept done for this and will be submitting a PR in the next couple of days.

[hassox]

cool

[aphillipo]

I'm looking for something like this too. Not sure of the correct way to do this without the Backdoor Middleware... What do people do in the mean time?

EDIT: https://github.com/ueberauth/guardian/issues/53

[hassox]

@aphillipo Down the bottom of http://blog.overstuffedgorilla.com/simple-guardian/ there's a way to work with session stored tokens. The backdoor middleware will make this dance much simpler.

[jamesvl]

The example in the blog mentioned above is what I was looking for - would you consider adding that snippet to the docs or readme file?

And although it's slower, I like that method better than the backdoor middleware which uses GET params to setup a fake user - for purposes of testing various routes, you are now no longer testing the exact route (since it has a query string), and there's a chance it conflicts with expected parameters (unlikely, but possible).

[doomspork]

@aaronrenner / @hassox — any updates on this functionality and PR #120?

[scrogson]

Tracking this in https://github.com/ueberauth/guardian/pull/354