It is becoming a trend for websites to enable logging into that website via another.
We’ve all seen it. The buttons that say “Sign in with Facebook”, or various other providers. For some reason unknown to me (really unknown to me because I don’t use social media), seeing these logins provide some kind of weird validity to a website. It’s like “Oh, they are connected with facebook, they must be credible”. When I know perfectly well that its just a little bit of code hooking into the facebook api. Regardless, implementing these login features for a user is a great strategy from a user experience (UX) standpoint.

Over the next few blog posts I’m going to go over step by step using provider authentication, and being able to use multiple providers for the same user. I feel logging into various providers is a valuable skill for every Rails developer, and a great tool to be able to use.
In the upcoming posts, I’ll use Amazon and Google as my examples. I’ll also detail what is needed to add another provider, and some quirks about certain ones (Twitter).