Aaron Thies

Finally, after several attempts, I have Auth working.  Now I’ll attempt to explain in a simple manner, like most of the sources I found.  I will also attempt to include all caveats, unlike any of the sources I found.

app/config/core.php

Place a salt value in Security.salt.  I suggest using the sha1 value on my password generator page.

You may want to increase Session.timeout beyond the default 2 minutes.

app/controller/users_controller.php

uses('sanitize');
class UsersController extends AppController {

    public $name = 'Users';
    public $components = array('Auth');

    function beforeFilter() {
        Security::setHash('sha1');
    }

    // The AuthComponent provides the needed functionality or login, so you can leave this function blank.
    function login() {
        print_r($this->Auth->data);
        print_r($this->Auth->password('password'))

        // set users.last_login
        if ((isset($_SESSION['Auth']['User']['id'])) && (is_numeric($_SESSION['Auth']['User']['id']))) {
            $sql = "UPDATE users SET last_login=NOW() WHERE id=" . Sanitize::escape($_SESSION['Auth']['User']['id']);
            $result = $this->User->query($sql);
        }

    }

    function logout() {
        $this->redirect($this->Auth->logout());
    }

}

Make sure you add Auth to the components array of any controller you plan to have any authentication on:

public $components = array('Auth');

Also you can specify which controller methods do not need authentication like this:

function beforeFilter() {
    $this->Auth->allow('index', 'results', 'animal', 'spotlight', 'breed');
}

app/model/

No model file is needed, but you need to create a database table with id, username, and password fields.  Any other fields will be paced in the Auth object (inside session), like this:

[Auth] => Array
        (
            [User] => Array
                (
                    [id] => 53
                    [first_name] => Aaron
                    [last_name] => Thies
                    [email] => athies@gmail.com
                    [username] => athies
                    [last_login] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00
                )

        )

You can find out what to set the password value in the users db table by using $this->Auth->password(’password’).  This caused me a lot of aggravation as I was just using SHA1(’password’).

You can tweak Auth using the various Auth methods outlined here: http://book.cakephp.org/view/172/authentication. These methods can be placed inside controller::beforeFilter().

app/views/users/login.ctp

if  ($session->check('Message.auth')) $session->flash('auth');

if ($session->check('Message.flash')) {
    $session->flash();
}

if ($session->check('Message.auth')) {
    $session->flash('auth');
}

echo $form->create('User', array('action' => 'login'));
echo $form->input('username');
echo $form->input('password');
echo $form->end('Login');

A Little Something More

During the course of getting Auth to work I learned this helpful hint.

If you ever produced this error, “Database table users for model User was not found.”, you can fix this by deleting everything in this folder: /app/tmp/cache/models