[severos]

I'm using Ruby Sinatra to build a blog for my self, but I'd like to have multiple users posting on it, I've looked around trying to find how to build this, but not really finding what I want so thought of asking here.
When building sessions/cookies, what is exactly going in the background? I want all details that you know since I'm building things from scratch.
What I currently can do:
-process HTTP requests (GET/POST/DELETE/...)
-set session variables: something like session[:foo] = Time.now and can destroy them.
-set cookies: something like: set_cookie "foo", "bar"
How do I go around authentication? and keeping track of who's logged in and not??
I'm totally lost at this stage since I have no previous knowledge, any ideas? or resources??

Thanks for your time.

[Crypto™]

You'll need to enable sessions by doing a very simple bit of code:

Code

enable :sessions

get '/foo' do
  session[:message] = 'Hello World!'
  redirect to('/bar')
end

get '/bar' do
  session[:message]   # => 'Hello World!'
end

If you need some more control over sessions, use Rack::Session::Cookie

Code

use Rack::Session::Cookie, :key => 'rack.session',
             :domain => 'foo.com',
             :path => '/',
             :expire_after => 2592000, # In seconds
             :secret => 'change_me'

However, it might be easier to use an authentication gem for actual authentication management.

[severos]

I've actually said that I know how to enable sessions and set values for them, also how to create cookies, I was more like asking how does the authentication actually works.
Somewhy I found it hard to understand the authentication gem, and generally I'm not good with databases (which is why I'm trying to practice), that's why I want to create authentication system from ground.
If you have actual websites code examples written in Sinatra with authentication that'll be awesome.
Thanks for your help.