Thank you so much for your instructions on removing Restful_Authentication in favor of AuthLogic.

I am developing a site for a company (who are operating in stealth mode right now) and I applied the changes to their site. The RoR site is hosted on Heroku. The site refused to restart when authentication system updates were applied, and eventually I found the solution (after two full days of hunting around). If your Heroku site won’t restart after you transition to AuthLogic from Restful_Authentication, you should

(A) do a backup of your development site, including your local git folder.
(B) Remove your git folder and recreate it (git init, etc.).
(C) Push your site back up onto Heroku using the -f (force) flag to forcibly replace what is there now.
(D) Apply any database changes using the usual “Heroku rake db:migrate”.

There are two very big warnings to accompany this:
1. Blowing your git directory away will cause you to lose your git history, and unless your project is being developed by a one-man-band, that won’t go down well with your colleagues.
2. Blowing the Heroku copy of your site away will cause your users to be unable to re-login. I found that I had to delete the users and force recreation of entirely fresh user profiles. My hunch is that even though you could go into your system as an admin and change their passwords for them, the existing password_salt will be incompatible with AL.

These changes were fine in my case as I switched from RA to AL before we went live, so I was effectively still in development on the Heroku server.

Jared – if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how people could avoid these pitfalls I’m sure I and your other readers will be pleased to read them.

Best regards,

Dan