Add paywall functionality to app

I would like to offer people x views of certain pages then prompt them to pay for access.
I was looking ot use this gem acts_as_paywall - https://github.com/BarefootCoders/acts_as_paywall
but wanted to know if there was an easier way to do this.

Thanks?

Hi Stan, if you're looking for something simple, I'd recommend just creating a session and using that session as a counter. The following is a pure Ruby implmentation. You'll want to make some adjustments for your Rails app. I haven't tested it within Rails yet but I think you'll get the point.

# Rails has a sessions object that you can use. the next line creates an object to represent it.
session = {}

# You typically have your content in a database and can pull it out as an object. The following will represent that object.
content = {}

# The following represents the values of your content.
content[:title] = 'Title of Content'
content[:content] = 'Display content'

# Create your pay wall session counter
session[:pay_wall] ||= 1

# Run your conditional to check the counter
if session[:pay_wall] >= 5
    puts 'Add Pay Wall code here'
elsif session[:pay_wall] >= 1
    session[:pay_wall] += 1
    puts content[:content]
else
    session[:pay_wall] = 1
    puts content[:content]
end

# Test the value of your session
puts session[:pay_wall]

Resources you may find interesting on the topic of sessions:
http://www.justinweiss.com/articles/how-rails-sessions-work/
http://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.0.1/classes/ActionDispatch/Integration/Session.html

Thanks John for the thorough answer. I'm going to have a go at rolling this from scratch.

You're welcome! Good luck! :)