Rails 2.x provide meaningful error message with http basic authentication

Posted by randombits on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by randombits
Published on 2010-06-03T03:14:45Z Indexed on 2010/06/03 3:24 UTC
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I'm using basic http authentication in my rails app via the following code:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helper :all # include all helpers, all the time
  before_filter :authenticate

private
  def authenticate
    authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |username, password|
      if username.nil? || password.nil?
        render :inline => %(xml.instruct! :xml, :version => "1.0", :encoding => "UTF-8"
                            xml.errors do
                              xml.error('Could not authenticate you.')
                            end), :type => :builder, :status => 401
      end
    end
  end
end

The problem is, if you do a curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/foo/1.xml without providing the -u username:password flag, you get a dead beat response like this:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized 
Cache-Control: no-cache
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Foo"
X-Runtime: 1
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 27
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/1.9.1/2010-01-10)
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:09:18 GMT
Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP Basic: Access denied.

Is it possible at all to render the inline XML I have above in the event a username and password is not provided by the user?

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