Exploring the Rails 8 authentication generator

February 4, 2025

This month we explored the new authentication generator that ships with Rails 8.

Here’s what we did:

1. Created a new Rails app.
2. Ran rails g authentication and explored the generated files.
3. Added Pico CSS (the classless version) for nice default styling.
4. Created a registration page by following this guide by Josef Strzibny.

Our rabbit trails included:

• Reading some insane and fun facts about SQLite.
• Puzzling out (with the help of this Reddit discussion) why the authentication generator creates a sessions table.