How do you access Devise controllers?

Question

Are controllers in devise automatically generated? How do you access them?

I know for views you do rails generate devise_views.

Answer 1

Under the assumption that you want to see these controllers in order to modify or override them, Devise now provides a simple generator which recreates their controllers in your app to make this easy. As per the documentation (which will be most up-to-date):

1) Create your custom controllers using the generator which requires a scope:

console

rails generate devise:controllers [scope]

If you specify users as the scope, controllers will be created in app/controllers/users/. And the sessions controller will look like this:

class Users::SessionsController < Devise::SessionsController
  # GET /resource/sign_in
  # def new
  #   super
  # end
  ...
end

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2) Tell the router to use this controller:

devise_for :users, controllers: { sessions: "users/sessions" }

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3) Copy the views from devise/sessions to users/sessions. Since the controller was changed, it won't use the default views located in devise/sessions.

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4) Finally, change or extend the desired controller actions.

You can completely override a controller action:

class Users::SessionsController < Devise::SessionsController
  def create
    # custom sign-in code
  end
end

Or you can simply add new behaviour to it:

class Users::SessionsController < Devise::SessionsController
  def create
    super do |resource|
      BackgroundWorker.trigger(resource)
    end
  end
end

This is useful for triggering background jobs or logging events during certain actions.

Remember that Devise uses flash messages to let users know if sign in was successful or unsuccessful. Devise expects your application to call flash[:notice] and flash[:alert] as appropriate. Do not print the entire flash hash, print only specific keys. In some circumstances, Devise adds a :timedout key to the flash hash, which is not meant for display. Remove this key from the hash if you intend to print the entire hash.