What is the Authenticity Token in Rails?
10 Answers
The authenticity token is designed so that you know your form is being submitted from your website. It is generated from the machine on which it runs with a unique identifier that only your machine can know, thus helping prevent cross-site request forgery attacks.
If you are simply having difficulty with rails denying your AJAX script access, you can use
<%= form_authenticity_token %>
to generate the correct token when you are creating your form.
You can read more about it in the documentation.
The Authenticity Token is rails' method to prevent 'cross-site request forgery (CSRF or XSRF) attacks'.
To put it simple, it makes sure that the PUT / POST / DELETE (methods that can modify content) requests to your web app are made from the client's browser and not from a third party (an attacker) that has access to a cookie created on the client side.
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