I recently started to use Resque to queue up some background work (emails, stats, etc) for KickoffLabs.

Resque (pronounced like “rescue”) is a Redis-backed library for creating background jobs, placing those jobs on multiple queues, and processing them later.

Resque ships with a built in "Sinatra"http://www.sinatrarb.com/ app which displays all sorts of interesting details about what is in your queues.

In Rails 3, adding a rack app like Resque::Server to your project is drop dead simple:

mount Resque::Server.new, :at => ‘/resque’

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is no built in way to restrict who can access the /resque path. Googling led to some great options for devise users as well as options for wrapping it in a custom rack app. I am not using devise and the rack examples felt messy.

Since Resque::Server is just a Sinatra app, I decided to take the simple path and subclassed Resque::Server (gist).

Here are two ways to add authentication/authorization:

In the first, I added a before block and redirect if the user does not meet some predefined condition (empty session, invalid roles, etc).

require 'resque/server'

class SecureResqueServer < Resque::Server

  before do
    redirect '/login' unless some_condition_is_met! 
  end

end

The only thing I don’t like about this path is the hardcoded login path. I have an open question on StackOverflow on how to get access to the routes from Sinatra.

The second option would be to simply use HttpAuthentication:

require 'resque/server'

class SecureResqueServer < Resque::Server

  use Rack::Auth::Basic, "Restricted Area" do |username, password|
    [username, password] == ['admin', 'admin']
  end

end

Once you choose your desired path, you simply need to wire it up in your routes file:

mount SecureResqueServer.new, :at => '/resque'