in your sinatra app simply require either "dm-core" or "rufus-tokyo" and then "sinatra-authentication" and turn on session storage with a super secret key, like so:

require "dm-core"
require "sinatra-authentication"

use Rack::Session::Cookie, :secret => 'A1 sauce 1s so good you should use 1t on a11 yr st34ksssss'

If you're using rufus-tokyo, you also need to set the database path for Users. like so:

require "rufus_tokyo"
require "sinatra-authentication"
TcUserTable.cabinet_path = File.dirname(__FILE__) + 'folder/where/you/wanna/store/your/database'

use Rack::Session::Cookie, :secret => 'A1 sauce 1s so good you should use 1t on a11 yr st34ksssss'

• get '/login'
• get '/logout'
• get '/signup'
• get/post '/users'
• get '/users/:id'
• get/post '/users/:id/edit'
• get '/users/:id/delete'

If you fetch any of the user pages using ajax, they will automatically render without a layout

This plugin provides the following helper methods for your sinatra app:

• login_required

  which you place at the beginning of any routes you want to be protected

• current_user
• logged_in?
• render_login_logout(html_attributes)

  Which renders login/logout and singup/edit account links. If you pass a hash of html parameters to render_login_logout all the links will get set to them. Which useful for if you're using some sort of lightbox

By default the user class includes a method called admin? which simply checks if user.permission_level == -1.

you can take advantage of this method in your views or controllers by calling current_user.admin? i.e.

- if current_user.admin?
  %a{:href => "/adminey_link_route_thing"} do something adminey

(these view examples are in HAML, by the way)

You can also extend the user class with any convenience methods for determining permissions. i.e.

#somewhere in the murky depths of your sinatra app
class User
  def peasant?
    self.permission_level == 0
  end
end

then in your views you can do

- if current_user.peasant?
  %h1 hello peasant!
  %p Welcome to the caste system! It's very depressing.

if no one is logged in, current_user returns a GuestUser instance, which responds to current_user.guest? with true, current_user.permission_level with 0 and any other method calls with false

This makes some view logic easier since you don't always have to check if the user is logged in, although a logged_in? helper method is still provided

when using rufus-tokyo, current_user returns a hash, so to get the primary key of the current_user you would do current_user[:pk]. if you wanna set an attribute, you can do something like current_user["has_a_dog"] = true and if you want to open a connection with the cabinet directly, you can do something like

user_connection = TcUser.new
users_with_gmail = user_connection.query do |q|
  q.add 'email', :strinc, 'gmail'
end
user_connection.close