Admin User the lazy way?

I'm SOOO tempted to go down this path, because it would be so much easier and quicker than learning and implementing the enums system. Try to talk me out of it, please.

You can also just add the admin field to your users, boolean, with false as default and make a before action like "redirect_to some_page_path unless current_user.admin == false". And modify this field only in the console, don't put it in the form and strong params ;)

I can't get this to work. I've put the following in the private section of my Materials controller:

def user_id_1?
    unless current_user.id = 1
      redirect_to materials_url, notice: "You have to be an admin to do this"
    end
end

And this at the top:

before_action :user_id_1?, only: [:new]

But it just doesn't work. It doesn't return an error, but instead just stops ANY user from doing the 'new' action, rather than just the user without an id of 1.

And yes, I have checked the user id's of the users I am testing this with.

Try this

current_user.id == 1

:)

Ok, so the user id of User.first wasn't actually 1; it was 6. And I couldn't change it permanently in the console (a bit of googling says that Rails prevents this).

I tried destroying all of the users and then creating a new one but, as expected, it didn't give the new user an id of 1 (it was something like 13).

So, I'm using User.first.id instead:

In the application controller (because it's quite a handy method):

def first_user?
  unless current_user.id == User.first.id
    redirect_to materials_path
  end
end

It works. The key really was finding out that you can't change a user id without forcing things, but it sounds like that might be a bit dangerous, so I opted for this instead.

I think I need to go back to reading up some more and adding to my 'core' knowledge - I'm just firefighting now without REALLY understanding what's going on.

On the positive side - look how far I've come, Maciej! :-) Remember helping me set up my environment only a few months ago? Now I've setup my badass dual-boot laptop and have a couple of apps up and running :-) I do think I need to read another book though.

I think you'd have to rake db:drop, rake db:create and rake db:migrate to reset the id counters to start from 1, but this wipes out all your objects in all tables. And yes, I see a lot of progress :).

Enums work very nicely with Pundit too.

And the can be used basically as a state machine too (with some more code). Last time I checked the state machine gem wasn't playing nice with Rails 4

Yeah, you have to use aasm instead.