Meet HelpDesk

On the right side of the screen, you can see a running Rails application — HelpDesk, a support ticket management system you’ll be working with throughout the tutorial.

The app has three user roles:

Try it out

Launch the Rails server:

$ bin/rails s

Sign in using one of the quick login links (or use the credentials below):

After signing in, you’ll be redirected to the Tickets page. Try creating a ticket, adding a comment, or editing existing ones.

Notice something?

Right now, every user can do everything — any user can edit or delete any ticket, read internal comments, and assign agents. There are no access controls in place (check out the app/controllers/tickets_controller.rb file).

That’s exactly the problem we’ll solve in this tutorial using Action Policy.

Using the terminal

You can also interact with the app through the terminal below the preview. Try opening a Rails console:

$ bin/rails console

Try listing users with their roles:

helpdesk(dev)> User.pluck(:name, :role)

Running tests

You can run Rails tests from the terminal as usual. For example, run the TicketsController integration tests:

$ bin/rails test test/integration/tickets_test.rb