Forgot password?

I was doing some more testing of our app yesterday--basically just trying sequences of actions that I could see a user doing. While doing this, I ran into an issue with the "Forgot Password" link that is displayed on the login form. When I clicked this link, it displayed a form where I could enter my email to have my password reset (which I had to restyle with CSS since it had accidentally been missed when I had redesigned the login and signup forms). However, when I clicked the button to have the application send an email to the provided address, the app blew up with an error message that said (in the true cryptic fashion of most error messages): "Missing host to link to! Please provide the :host parameter, set default_url_options[:host], or set :only_path to true". Essentially, this was telling me that the mailer for the application was not set up.

So I did some googling and found this blog post on mailer setup and this related blog post on environment variables. I was able to modify the instructions in the first blog post (with hard coded values for the mailer settings since at this point I just wanted to make sure it worked) and added these lines to the development.rb file (since I was just testing it locally):

  config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp

  config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {

    address: "smtp.gmail.com",

    port: 587,

    domain: "domain.com",

    authentication: "plain",

    enable_starttls_auto: true,

    user_name: "user@domain.com",

    password: "password123456"

  }

Obviously, the domain, user_name, and password fields are just filled in with nonsense values for the purposes of this example, but, for testing, I filled them in with my gmail account information so I could make sure everything was working. I also added this

  config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'localhost:7777' }

to the development.rb file so that the mailer would work on the localhost setup (port 7777 is used instead of 3000 because we have Facebook authentication).

Once these changes have been made, the server needs to be restarted in order for the changes to take affect (which I forgot the first time and therefore spent several frustrating minutes trying to figure out what I did wrong).

Now, to ensure that the username and password for the mailer is not available for anyone with some computer skills to see, environment variables need to be used. This is where I need to discuss how to handle this with my teammates, since it appears that this requires setting up another gem called "foreman", which changes quite a few things about the app (including how the webserver is started) so we need to make sure that this will work without breaking other parts of the app. Fernando also has the same issue with code that he had added for a contact form so we need to figure out how to hide the username and password from the rest of world.