Specifying attributes of a Rails object passed into a JSON object

render :json => @user

will call to_json on the @user object. And the to_json method will use the as_json method to do its work. So you can easily override the as_json to pass only what you want to the clients. Like in the following:

def as_json options={}
  {
    attr1: attr1,
    attr2: attr2
  }
end