Failures

When a failure occurs when authenticating a response in Warden, a rack endpoint is called. This Rack endpoint is refereed to as the failure app.

When you add the middleware to the stack, you need to provide it with a rack endpoint to be called when there is a failure with the authentication.

Failing Authentication

To fail authentication simply throw an :warden symbol. You can throw it as a bare symbol, or with a hash.

throw(:warden)  # bails out to the failure application
throw(:warden, :some => :option) # bails out to the failure application  and places the options hash in env['warden.options']

This can be thrown in any downstream middleware or endpoint.

When a failure occurs and :warden is thrown, here’s what happens:

1. The lazy auth object is checked for redirects, custom rack responses etc. If there is a failure, or nothing has occurred, the failure app is called
2. env[‘PATH_INFO’] is re-written to “/unauthenticated”
3. any options passed to the throw are included at env[‘warden.options’]
4. Any before_failure Callbacks are called
5. The failure application is called