I'll assume you know what Sparkly Authentication is since it seems to be installed. If that assumption is incorrect, you should check out the Sparkly Authentication readme instead. So let's get right into usage. This text was generated by the Sparkly command-line generator, invoked via: script/generate sparkly help Depending on what arguments are attached, this generator is capable of producing various different results. So let's go through them one at a time, in the most common order... 0. Usually the first thing you'll want to do is generate the models which will actually be authenticated, such as a User model. See the Rails Guides for more details on that. You don't need to actually run the migrations yet, however. 1. After you know which models will be authenticated, you're ready to invoke the Sparkly Config generator: script/generate sparkly config This will generate a Rails Initializer in config/initializers that will be used to set up Sparkly during runtime. This tells it what encryption type to use, which models to authenticate, and so on. You should take a look at this file to make sure the configuration is what you are expecting. Do that. Now. 2. You also need to generate the database table which stores the password information -- I'm talking about migrations! script/generate sparkly migrations 4. Run the server and try it out. See how things feel. If you want more control over the views (and you should), you can generate them like so: script/generate sparkly views Their final resting place basically depends on what your Sparkly config from Step 1 looks like. So I hope you double checked it. 5. Finally, if you need control over the, er, controllers, you can go ahead and generate them like so: script/generate sparkly controllers Note that exactly which controllers and how many of them will be generated depends, once again, on your Sparkly config. Note also that this will generate the corresponding views for you, so you can skip step 4 if you already know you need to customize the controllers. This file has been saved to doc/sparkly_authentication.txt for your reference.