git-it-gyrl / phase-4-cookies-and-sessions-lab

Cookies and Sessions Lab

Learning Goals

• Use the session hash to persist data across multiple requests

Introduction

In this lab, you'll be building out a blog paywall feature by using the session hash to keep track of how many page views a user has made.

There is some starter code in place for a Rails API backend and a React frontend. To get set up, run:

bundle install
rails db:migrate db:seed
npm install --prefix client

You can work on this lab by running the tests with learn test. It will also be helpful to see what's happening during the request/response cycle by running the app in the browser. You can run the Rails server with:

rails s

And you can run React in another terminal with:

npm start --prefix client

You don't have to make any changes to the React code to get this lab working.

Instructions

Our app will keep track of how many blog posts a user has viewed by using the session hash. Each user can view a maximum of three articles before seeing the paywall.

When a user makes a GET request to /articles/:id, the following should happen:

• If this is the first request this user has made, set session[:pageviews_remaining] to an initial value of 3. Hint: consider using ||= to set this initial value
• For every request to /articles/:id, decrement the value of session[:pageviews_remaining] by 1.
• If session[:pageviews_remaining] has a value greater than 0, render a JSON response with the article data.
• If session[:pageviews_remaining] as a value of 0 or less, render a JSON response including an error message, and a status code of 401 unauthorized.

Resources

• Rails - Accessing the Session