title: How to identify unique clients in Rails or with a preferred Ruby Gem?
body: <p>Trying to figure out how to identify unique users properly with cookies and perhaps coupling that with the public IP.</p>
  
  <p>What's the suggested path to follow in this regard? (I'm open to a standard Rails method or leveraging another Ruby Gem if that's more elegant.)</p>
  
  <p>On the topic of cookies, which is the proper way to retrieve client cookies in Rails 3.x+? I have been using <code>cookies</code>, but it seems that <code>request.cookies</code> also works. <em>What is the difference / preference when using these two?</em>  I've seemingly seen <code>request.cookies</code> fail in some instances; but perhaps it was after clearing out the cookies for the app prior to refreshing and working with it in the console.</p>
  
  <p><em>Also, do cookies have a unique ID that can be utilized to identify clients uniquely?</em></p>
  
  <p>Essentially my goal is to count visits per unique visitor to a site.  I am assuming I will need to compare a unique cookie ID and perhaps an IP, but I'm not sure what would be most kosher in this situation.</p>
  
  <p>Ultimately I need to to understand how to uniquely identify visitors of the site and then store them in a count or number of visits to the site for that visitor.</p>