How to add Mission Control to your Rails app and protect it with Basic Auth

Aug 7, 2024 | Kyrylo Silin · @kyrylosilin · bluesky:@kyrylo.org

Mission Control is a powerful tool for monitoring and managing your Rails jobs in real-time. It offers insights into your app’s performance and errors. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to integrate Mission Control into your Rails app and secure it with Basic Auth.

Installation

To get started, add the Mission Control gem to your Rails application’s Gemfile:

bundle add mission_control-jobs

Next, you need to mount Mission Control’s engine in your routes.rb file. This will make the Mission Control UI accessible from your application:

# config/routes.rb

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount MissionControl::Jobs::Engine, at: "/jobs"
end

With this configuration, you can now access Mission Control’s UI at /jobs, where you can browse queues, inspect jobs, and manage failed jobs.

Securing Mission Control with Basic Auth

To protect the Mission Control interface, it’s a good idea to add authentication. By default, Mission Control’s controllers extend your application’s ApplicationController. If your app doesn’t enforce authentication, anyone can access /jobs. To secure this, you can specify a different base controller class that includes authentication.

First, create an MissionControlController with basic authentication:

# app/controllers/mission_control_controller.rb

class MissionControlController < ApplicationController
  http_basic_authenticate_with(
    name: "admin",
    password: "admin"
  )
end

Next, configure Mission Control to use this controller as its base class. Add the following to your config/application.rb:

# config/application.rb

config.mission_control.jobs.base_controller_class = "MissionControlController"

Alternatively, you can add this configuration to a specific environment file, like config/environments/production.rb, to only enable authentication in production.

Now, when you access /jobs, you’ll be prompted to enter the username and password you specified in the MissionControlController.

Customizing Basic Auth

It’s recommended to use environment variables or Rails credentials for the username and password instead of hardcoding them in your code.

I personally prefer using Rails credentials for this purpose. You can generate the credentials file by running:

bin/rails credentials:edit

Then, add the following to your config/credentials.yml.enc:

mission_control:
  username: admin
  password: admin

And update your MissionControlController to use these credentials:

class MissionControlController < ApplicationController

  # When you deploy to production, the `assets:precompile` step will fail
  # without this check.
  # https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/existing/#access-to-environment-variables-at-build-time
  if Rails.application.credentials.mission_control
    http_basic_authenticate_with(
      name: Rails.application.credentials.mission_control[:username],
      password: Rails.application.credentials.mission_control[:password]
    )
  end
end

Conclusion

Adding Mission Control to your Rails app is a great way to monitor and manage your background jobs. By securing it with Basic Auth, you can ensure that only authorized users can access the Mission Control interface. Give it a try and see how it can help you keep your app running smoothly!

For more information and advanced configurations, refer to the official documentation.