Private Access Tokens Rails demo

Private Access Tokens (PATs) are being touted as an end to CAPTCHAs.

PATs benefits include privacy protection, fraud prevention, and major user experience improvement.

With PATs, an app or website can confirm that the user is a real human and not a bot or other malicious actor. Without linking your identity to your activity! And without you having to click any extra buttons or type any hard-to-read letters!

At the moment, there isn't a lot of documentation out there on how to support PATs. I.e. how do I update my app or web server to accept PATs? Hopefully this code example helps!

For a full explainer, see my blog post.

Set up

Ruby version

Please refer to .ruby-version to find the Ruby version for this project. You may want to use a Ruby version management tool to install and set your local Ruby version. I prefer rbenv.

Ruby on Rails

This is a vanilla Ruby on Rails setup.

Dependencies

I tried to reduce dependencies as much as possible. This project uses Bundler to manage the Ruby gems. If you don't already have Bundler, you can install it as you would any other gem.

gem install bundler

Running the app

git clone https://github.com/mercedesb/private-access-tokens-rails.git
cd private-access-tokens-rails
bundle install
bin/rails dev:cache
bin/rails server

* Note: enabling caching is very important for this demo :)

Running the tests

This project uses minitest as the unit testing framework.

bin/rails test