ruby on rails - skip_before_filter ignores conditionals

Question

I'm trying to use skip_before_filter only if the app is in production mode. (I don't want my development instances public, and I want the app to automatically detect what type of instance it is on and display a log-in screen when it is not in production mode). So, my application controller has the following line:

before_filter :authenticate_user!, :except => "sign_in" #redirects to log-in

And the controller for displaying pages has this line:

skip_before_filter :authenticate_user!, :only => :show, :if => :in_production
#public pages are public, but only when in production.

And in_production is simply:

  def in_production
    ENV['RAILS_ENV']=='production'
  end

I realize that there may be other avenues here, but I'm curious as to why skip_before_filter seems to ignore the conditional and always just skip the before_filter. Is there something I'm missing?

Answer 1

It is a Rails bug (or at least an undocumented strange behaviour). It is tracked here: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/9703

In this thread, you can find a (twisted) solution.

Instead of

skip_before_filter :authenticate_user!, :only => :show, :if => :in_production

write

skip_before_filter :authenticate_user!, :only => :show
before_filter      :authenticate_user!, :only => :show, :unless => :in_production

It worked for me.