Rack/Rails integration

Rack middleware

The SDK comes with a Rack middleware which lazily loads the Clerk session and user. It inserts a clerk key in the Rack environment, which is an instance of Clerk::Proxy. To get the session or the user of the session, you call session or user respectively. In case there is no session, you can retrieve the API error with the error getter method.

Rails integration

If you add the gem in a Rails app, the Rack middleware will be included automatically in the middleware stack. For easier access to the Clerk session and user, include the Clerk::Authenticatable concern in your controller:

require "clerk/authenticatable"
 
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include Clerk::Authenticatable
end

This gives your controller and views access to the following methods:

• clerk_session
• clerk_user
• clerk_user_signed_in?

Protected controllers

If you want to protect a subset of your controllers (for example, if you have an admin section), you can add a before_filter like this:

class AdminsController < ApplicationController
  before_action :require_clerk_session
 
  private
  def require_clerk_session
    redirect_to clerk_sign_in_url unless clerk_session
  end
end

Don't forget to set the environment variable CLERK_SIGN_IN_URL or the method clerk_sign_in_url will fail.

Last updated on September 29, 2023