Alpha testing - Simple as possible! ☆

A really easy way of beta testing your Ruby on Rails application is to use Basic HTTP Authentication. There are methods built into Rails to do this in your application controller just put

  before_filter :http_authenticate
  def http_authenticate
    authenticate_or_request_with_http_basic do |username, password|
      username == 'my_username' && password == 'my_password'
    end
  end

Every request will put through this filter and users will not be able to use your site without this username and password.