jarlah

How to test live views with ash authentication plugs

I’m trying to find out how to test live views that are protected by Ash Authentication.

A straight forward way is to just fill in username and password and hit submit when visiting a protected page.

In my normal live view code I have this function in my conn_case.ex

  def log_in_user(conn, user) do
    token = ActivityPlanner.Accounts.generate_user_session_token(user)

    conn
    |> Phoenix.ConnTest.init_test_session(%{})
    |> Plug.Conn.put_session(:user_token, token)
  end

But this is using the custom auth stuff generated from gen.auth.

How can make something similar for Ash Authentication ? I think that’s maybe one of the problems with opaque code. Oh and yes I could probably peer into the source code, but currently I’m just whipping out some code and tries to avoid rabbit holes

the ash project im working on is this GitHub - jarlah/ash-activity-planner · GitHub and the original project I worked on previously with normal live views is this one GitHub - jarlah/activity-planner: An example Phoenix application with foreign key multi tenancy · GitHub

Both of which are hobby projects with sole purpose to grind my way into getting familiar with all of Elixir

19 comments

/phoenix /ash #liveview

24 1503 19

2025-10-07 21:01:29 UTC

Marked As Solved

jarlah

after a lot of trial and error, and inspecting the connection after login, I saw that a “user” was stored in the session in the form of

      "user" => "user?id=ef6f74a3-3795-4f0d-be4f-622db62f8c01"

so I made it all work in the tests by doing this:

  setup %{conn: conn} do
    user =
      AshActivityPlanner.Accounts.User
      |> Ash.Changeset.for_create(:register_with_password, %{
        email: "test@user.com",
        password: "password",
        password_confirmation: "password"
      })
      |> AshActivityPlanner.Accounts.create!()

    {:ok, %{conn: log_in_user_as_subject(conn, user)}}
  end

  # SNIP ...

  defp log_in_user_as_subject(conn, user) do
    subject = AshAuthentication.user_to_subject(user)

    conn
    |> Phoenix.ConnTest.init_test_session(%{})
    |> Plug.Conn.put_session("user", subject)
  end

Post #6

Also Liked

brunoripa

Hi !

I have a slightly different implementation for my log_in_user:

    strategy = AshAuthentication.Info.strategy!(User, :password)

    assert {:ok, %User{} = user} =
             AshAuthentication.Strategy.action(strategy, :sign_in, %{
               email: email,
               password: password
             })

    conn
    |> Phoenix.ConnTest.init_test_session(%{})
    |> store_in_session(user)

I am leveraging the strategy so that I will be detecting any change in the resource if any, and also I am using the store_in_session function coming from AshAuthentication.Plug.Helpers, which will protect me from any eventual future change in the api.

Do you see any counterargument for such an implementation ?

Thanks

Post #10

zachdaniel

Creator of Ash

I haven’t personally tested live views protected with AshAuthentication unfortunately. @jimsynz will probably be able to provide some more info after the weekend. You may have some luck looking at the test suite for AshAuthenticationPhoenix?

Post #3

jimsynz

Ash Core Team

Hi there.

You can rewrite the log_in_user/2 function to use AshAuthentication in a few ways. Here I am assuming that your user resource is called User - if it is something else you will need to change current_user to current_X.

If your application is using retrieve_from_session/2 (possibly via AshAuthentication.Phoenix.Plug.load_from_session/2) and has require_token_presence_for_authentication? set:

def log_in_user(conn, user) do
  {:ok, token, _} = AshAuthentication.Jwt.token_for_user(user)

  conn
  |> Phoenix.ConnTest.init_test_session(%{})
  |> Plug.Conn.put_session("current_user_token", token)
end

If your application is using retrieve_from_session/2 and doesn’t have require_token_presence_for_authentication? set:

def log_in_user(conn, user) do
  subject = AshAuthentication.user_to_subject(user)

  conn
  |> Phoenix.ConnTest.init_test_session(%{})
  |> Plug.Conn.put_session("current_user", subject)
end

Lastly, if you’re using retrieve_from_bearer/2 (possibly via AshAuthentication.Phoenix.Plug.load_from_bearer/2) you can do:

def log_in_user(conn, user) do
  {:ok, token, _} = AshAuthentication.Jwt.token_for_user(user)

  conn
  |> Plug.Conn.put_req_header("authorization", "Bearer #{token}")
end

All of this information is introspectable via AshAuthentication.Info - so I would welcome a PR that adds some test helpers to AshAuthentication.

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