--- title: Limit access to data to authorized users Rails 6 slug: limit-access-to-data-to-authorized-users-rails-6 published_at: 2021-03-10 18:00:04 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:23 +0000 summary: description: Only show users the data that belongs to them. Using authenticated users that we created in the previous episode with devise, we'll limit access to videos, description templates, and presenters to only the user who owns those objects. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [limit access, limit access to data to authorized users in Rails 6, devise, Rails 6, ROR, Ruby on Rails, Ruby, authentication, authorization, Protect, hide, user model, rails user authentication, ruby on rails tutorial, rails devise, rails 6 tutorial, rails 6 devise] views: 572 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/limit-access-to-data-to-authorized-users-rails-6 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1g0pTMXhk youtube_id: LU1g0pTMXhk embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/LU1g0pTMXhk thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LU1g0pTMXhk/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Limit access to data to authorized users Rails 6 *Published: March 10, 2021* *Views: 572* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1g0pTMXhk) [![Limit access to data to authorized users Rails 6](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LU1g0pTMXhk/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU1g0pTMXhk) ## Description Only show users the data that belongs to them. Using authenticated users that we created in the previous episode with devise, we'll limit access to videos, description templates, and presenters to only the user who owns those objects. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript so in a previous episode we uh added devise for authentication in this episode i want to show how you can restrict access to certain resources because as it is right now anyone who logs in is able to see all of the videos from any other like most recently authenticated user and so the next step that we want to take is to make it so that when you connect to youtube that session that youtube session is somehow related to the user who is authenticated and then make sure that only the videos for that authenticated youtube session are related to that user etc so i think initially we can just keep it to one channel so like once when you have a one login one one user is related exactly to one youtube channel um and then we only show the videos for each youtube channel i think that's okay to start we're not gonna have teams we're just gonna have one um you know just like one login and then uh you authenticate to youtube and that is just connected directly to your user account um and so if we recall uh we created this user model but we didn't actually associate it with any youtube sessions yet so we have youtube session dot last so we have a youtube session model and that has like the client secret and the client id and all that and this is how you authenticate to youtube is with the credentials from a youtube session but this doesn't actually relate at all to a user so the first thing we want to do probably is the way that i have this set up is you can create multiple youtube sessions for the same channel i think what we want to do is make it so that you once you connect your your youtube channel id is on the user model um and i can't remember if we have the youtubes yeah i don't think we even have the uh the youtube so we want to relate every single youtube session to an individual user but i'm trying to figure out how do we limit those users to only one channel and i think the way we might want to do this is just store the channel id on the user model the very first time they authenticate and then from there forward we can just check to make sure that when they're authenticating that we only associate the youtube session to the user if it's the same channel so on the user model we need to add a youtube channel id and then on each youtube session we need to add a user id so let's do something like this we'll say rails g migration we'll add youtube channel id to users youtube channel id and that'll just be a string value for the channel id and then we're going to say rails g migration add user id to uh youtube sessions and that's going to be that's actually going to be user references because we want that to be a foreign key to the user model so let's go to add youtube youtube channel id to users first make sure this came out all right it did it is nullable because initially when someone first signs up they don't actually have a channel id set yet and so we're just going to say this is nullable and that's that's totally fine and then the next one here is the the add in the user id let's make sure this added correctly so add reference youtube sessions user it can't be null um and it is a foreign key so yeah let's make it so that it can't be known i think that's safe okay so rake db migrate now we need to like actually make sure that the associations are set up for these right so because we're adding a non-nullable foreign key field then we need to make sure that we drop the database rate db drop db create db migrate okay so that's going to drop the whole database and that's okay and then the next thing we want to do is just go to the user model and make sure that this thing has has many youtube sessions and um okay and then we want to go to youtube sessions youtube sessions youtube session dot rb and this is going to say something like uh belongs to user um and then we need to add some sort of validation so that when we're creating youtube sessions we're not creating them for channels that are not the same as the one that we're authenticating to but i'm when i was looking at those credentials i didn't actually see the channel id so like if we look at um let's actually say let's annotate the model so we can see the columns and then if we open up youtube session right like this credentials json blob i don't think this has the channel id so let's let's just go check that out so uh oh we we deleted it so um we need to restart the server and because we just added all these associations i think when we first create the user that should be fine it's when we go to create this session um this is where things are going to change a little bit because instead of just creating a session like so we need to create it and pass in the current user so that we're only creating youtube sessions for the current user so let's let's take a look so we're going to need to sign up so we're going to click sign up jenny rosen that example dot com password password and then click sign up okay so we've successfully signed up now when we click this youtube button we want to we're going to authenticate to youtube but when we come back from the authentication process we will have the access token and the client secret but what i want to see is like is there a way to get the um the channel id from from this uh auth client so um let's see let's just let's just um for now um before we yeah when we when we get back to this callback we should be logged in so we should be authenticated as the current user so i believe we should have current user and that has youtube sessions it has a youtube sessions association so the user model right this here has the youtube sessions association so instead of creating with uh with a bang directly on the class name i'm going to update it so that we're using the association to create here and we're just going to pass in the same thing so we're going to pass in credentials and the um the other thing that we want to do is we want to say like if if current user.youtube channel id is is blank then we want to update the current user to have current user dot youtube or dot update youtube channel id 2 um some channel id and we need to figure out where we're going to get this channel id from so i think i actually want to how do we want to inspect this we could just like add a break point here with buy bug so that we break in this controller action when we get back to the callback to try to see if the auth client or if anything else that's at this point will give us the channel id otherwise channel id is just going to be uh nil okay so let's let's go through the authentication flow we're going to connect to youtube and we're going to say yep authenticate this channel pick myself and when we are redirected back to localhost 3000 ah so we should be broken okay here we are so auth client off client.methods.com minus class.new.methods.sort and then we'll use puts so that's a little bit cleaner oh interesting person i wonder what that's about and okay so we've got the access token additional parameters let's see what that is auth client.additionalparameters nope okay um off client.person no um um but it doesn't actually give us anything about the token okay so i think we're gonna have to fetch the um the channel id using something like fetch myself or like you know like um what is the identity the identity function once we get this uh once we get this callback we go to references channels um list uh list my channel so then okay so how does this work retrieves the channel data for the authorized youtube's user's youtube channel it uses the mine request parameter um okay so i think this yeah all right so i think what we're going to need to do is oh this is this is tricky because our youtube our youtube um service here takes in a session and then uses that sessions credentials in order to do this so what we need to do is we need to first initialize a new instance of a session so we're going to say youtube session.new and we're going to pass in credentials we're just going to pass in this here so we're going to build an instance an in-memory instance of a youtube session temp session equals this and what we're going to do is we're going to pass that into a new youtube service so we're going to initialize a new youtube service so youtube is youtube.new temp session and we're going to use that youtube service to fetch the or to list the channels for this session and there should only be one that matches mine so y dot fetch channel and this should be my channel or like user's channel or something and fetch channel i don't think we need to pass anything in there um so let's see fetch channel is going to be something like service dot list channel or channels or something and then there's going to be some part and then there's going to be this authorization block and so we need to go figure out what the list channel thing are where this where this argument goes so mine i believe is a filter okay so it's a the filter and then the part we only really need the id so i think we can just pass id for the part and then in terms of the filter um let's go look at the youtube gem rubygem uh youtube it's like github.com youtube uh this one okay so i think this is the file we care about list channel channels nope not the one we care about uh let's see can i not search this oh here it is whoa interesting oh that that moved around on me okay youtube or list channels let's see here we go okay list channels okay so we give it the part the category id for username uh mine is true so here's mine true i think and that should fetch our own channel it returns a list of list channel responses so i'm guessing this is like channels and we just want to return like channels.first or something so let's just drop in another debugger there to see if we can actually make this happen so we'll go back to localhost and restart our server okay we click connect to youtube go through the flow and we should be broken here okay so channels it did return one channel so channels not first no channels so channels how do we get at the actual channels um channels dot items dot first okay it looks like that is what actually returns the channel channels dot items dot first should give us back the channel and then i think yeah dot id should give us the channel id and just to double check i think we can go like uh youtube.com c and then paste in the channel id oh no okay [Music] um youtube.com channel slash the id boom okay so that does drop us into the right channel um so here we would just say uh user's channel users channel.id so that should update the channel id on the user and then instead of calling create down here we want to set temp session.userid is equal to current user.id and then we want to actually save that in the database so i think yeah so here if this doesn't work for some reason if we don't use the bang then i think it's going to fail silently and similarly if we say temp session dot save bang here that should fail with um with a big error and that that's fine for now uh all right so let's okay so let's do this let's refresh this page we gotta like go through the whole flow again so we click connect to youtube sign in with our stuff and now let's take a look at the database real c user dot account we should only have one user.last dot okay so it has a youtube channel id right and we can say user.user.last.youtube sessions and that has a youtube session which has the user id correctly it actually has several sessions in here but the most recent one should be the correct one and then the other thing we need to do is say like if if it does have a channel id then we want to say else if the current user.youtube channel id does not equal if it doesn't equal the user's channel dot id then we want to do nothing then we want to just say like render or like yeah so we should probably say like flash dot now our flash dot errors flash errors is equal to like um a list of strings where it just has one string with the error message we want to display saying something like um [Music] unable to connect to different like to an unknown channel with id okay uh user channel.id okay otherwise we'll just save um yeah so if i tried now to connect to youtube with a different channel like say this old wise minute channel uh oh cool all right so because i've only allowed one user then it only actually works with one user anyway so that's fine um but yeah okay and we can still connect with the same channel so that's that's all cool um all right so i think this is great this is looking good uh and i'm pretty happy with how this is working at least to limit the session the youtube session to the correct user now the next thing we want to do is um our videos do not actually have any relation to a a user or a youtube session or a channel or anything and so what i want to do is add and make a video belong to a user um so let's do that now so we'll generate a new migration rails g migration add user id to videos and then we'll say user references and that looks good okay rake db migrate annotate i think there's a way to set it up so that when you when you run a migration it runs this annotation for you automatically but um when i like in the past i've had an experience where it changed from one version to another so yeah your mileage may vary belongs to user and then a user has many videos okay and then in our we have a rake task for fetching videos instead of just calling video.create we need to actually call video dot or like okay so instead of just passing in youtube session.last here and just like assuming there's only one user we actually need to iterate over like all the users and fetch their most recent youtube session um and and then fetch their videos so uh user dot all.each do user okay and then for each user we have potentially a youtube session so user dot youtube sessions dot last so that'll give us a new youtube thing and then we'll fetch videos and when we're saving those videos we can say video.create or user.videos.create and then it should create all of this stuff and then the other thing is that like instead of category.first and descriptiontemplate.last we need these also to be related directly to a user so let's go do category and description template so rail like it's basically the same thing but we need it for categories and description templates uh let's see description templates migrate again and then we'll annotate again and then we want to open our task backup and instead of category.first we want to have like user.categories.first and description template is going to be user.descript and we need to go add those associations so on the user model this needs to have has many categories has many description templates and category belongs to a user and a description template also belongs to a user okay so back to our task here we can say okay so that actually looks pretty good um rather than fetching the category.first and description template.last i'm going to make one tiny modification here because these are going to fire database queries if it's not cached i think so i'm just going to instead of doing it for every single video i'm just going to pull them out up here and just say like category is user.cat and template is user.descriptiontemplates.last just so that we don't have to like look them up every time and this is template okay uh all right so i think this should create the videos and categories and such um i actually don't think we have any templates yeah we don't have any description templates and we don't have any categories so let's go to the description templates controller and so here instead of instead of index the index being all description templates this should be like user current user.description templates dot all and then here when we create the description template we'll say current user.description templates dot new so basically like anywhere that we we used to have just like the class name defined um we want to like associate these with a current user okay so we'll do that change in a couple different places here uh and that should work fine i don't think we need it for new but sure we can we can do it for new also uh all right so then we also need to do the same thing for categories here so we want to say like current user.categories.all same thing for new and create and edit and update um cool so yeah like for example if you try to edit a category and look it up by id when it's not your user then you should just like get a 404 so this find method should result in a 404 if it's not for you so the other thing i wanted to do was right now we don't have a temp or like a link at the top to go to categories so let's go to our application html erb and just add a quick link here for categories uh we need to also do presenters all right so uh let's see let's make our migration um to presenters all right presenter now belongs to a user and a user has many presenters okay presenters controller is going to say current user.presenters.all okay all right pretty simple stuff um all right so now uh rake db migrate and then we'll also annotate okay so we should be able to add a description template that's like default and it has like um presenters dot oh let's see summary whatever uh and then we'll just save something like that okay so now we have a description template let's sign out and then sign up as a different user so jennyrosen2 and we'll make the password password okay so now if we go to um templates we don't see any templates because that's not for us that's not for our user right so if we added a new template here and we called it like template two and we just say testing then and we create this template too if we edit we notice that the id of that second template is two right and now if we sign out and sign back in with password and click log in now we go to templates and we see that our template is template 1. if we try to go to template 2 it slash edit it should fail because that it couldn't find our our description template without id uh and i believe in production this would just throw a 404 page um for record not found so that's that's what we want to do that's how we're like protecting access it should work for templates it should work for categories let's see ruby on rails uh the title color is that pink color and then the the other color is this um bluish color sure and then if we have our presenters we can add you know like cj see jav dev yeah i'd love for you to follow me on twitter too hit me up uh we could chat um and then yeah our so that's our presenters and then if we have uh our videos we actually haven't fetched our videos so we need to uh like call our this this youtube uh youtube task so the thing is that like if there are no youtube sessions we should probably um user.youtubesessions.com blank empty we want to just like skip it so that we don't end up trying to um get the youtube session when it's nil and then just having an error so we're saying like um if the user has never uh authenticated with youtube and skip all right and then yeah i don't know let's give it a whirl so rake youtube fetch videos and let's see what happens so the second the second user should have no videos oh look at that okay cool so the first user so this is the user that has like the legit session and then if we log back in as jenny rosen2 with the password then what okay so there should not be any videos here did we not do it for the videos videos controller oh we didn't okay so we good this is great we didn't actually uh current user.videos um we didn't do the authentication bit in the videos controller so we do want to so we want to like scope everything in this controller also to the current user current user.presenters.all current user.categories.all okay so i saw a couple other things in here so we need to go through this one a little bit more carefully since there is so much more to it so in here we need current user.videos.find and then instead of youtube session.last we want currentuser.youtube.com sessions.last and i'm starting to notice a pattern where we're like fetching the current user and then we're passing in all of this stuff to get back an instance of youtube um i think this is probably fine still but i might make a helper method on current user to just say like current user.youtube service and that would just return a new one of these with the correct session filled out what's nice about that is if we change what the logic is and from being like the last session to being like the most recent successfully synced or updated session or something similar then we don't have to like go and update all these but for now i'm just going to keep it easy current user.youtubesessions.last and we'll just keep rocking it like so um the other thing too is that like if we wanted to add a team in here like some sort of concept of a team we would need to go through and update all these references all right so now if we refresh we don't see any videos because we're signed in as someone who hasn't authenticated if we go back to our user our first user that has videos then we log in we can see the videos super cool so now if we dive into one of these we do see the description is being generated gosh this is still so ugly there's like uh default right the default fonts and stuff for the browser but um yeah okay so this is uh we went through and we updated uh access to the correct um limiting access to the resources we unlimited access to the resources um so the first thing remember recall that the first thing we did was we went into the youtube um sessions controller and we updated this so that when we receive the callback as part of the oauth flow that we first fire up a temporary youtube session with the credentials we received back from um from the authentication flow we initialized a new service and fetched the channel so that we had the id the youtube channel id and we could ensure that the current user was not switching between different youtube channels um we then associated the uh the currently logged in user with a given youtube session which allows us to have like a set of authenticate like youtube oauth credentials for a given user um then we went through and updated all of our resources like uh like the videos resource for instance so that they had a new column in the database called user underscore id which allowed us to build a foreign key reference and association between a video and a user and also all of the other resources that are related to users so categories description templates presenters etc these are all now related directly to users so that we can scope access to those resources directly to users and then we went through all the controllers like the videos controller and we updated the references here from being the full class name of video to now being scoped to retrieve the videos through the videos association on the current user so again the current user is a reference to the user that is authenticated using devise and we have a video about how to set up device authentication if you want to check that out otherwise i think that is it for this episode so thanks for watching if you liked the video if you want to hit that thumbs up that will help other people find this i really appreciate everyone dropping comments it sounds like some of these have been helpful for like boot camp final projects and such so love to hear that i'd love to see that so if this is helpful for you please let me know in the description also if you have certain topics that you want covered let me know and we can check those out so this is what we have planned for the next few things we want i want to set up a background job for using the refresh token to retrieve a new refreshed auth token for each of these youtube sessions so that we don't have to like click the connect to youtube button every single time and then also i was thinking about setting up some web hooks from youtube so that when a video is posted we can do things like automating a tweet that goes out or automating a message in slack and then at some point we got to get around to styling so um that's that's a wrap appreciate it and we'll see you next time --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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