Devise: determine unconfirmed, confirmed, or not signed in user

• rails

Published on Feb. 10, 2014

I am developing a JSON api in rails that is using Devise to authenticate users. If the user does a GET request to the root URL, I return a list of useful URLs. I want to return different URLS depending on the status of the user:

• Not Signed In - register and sign_in URLs
• Not Confirmed - resendconfirmation, register, and signin URLs
• Confirmed - URLs to content

Normally, a route will immediately be rejected if the user is not a valid and confirmed user. To get around this and determine the 3 scenarios, I did the following:

Add a skip before filter for the index route:

class HomeController
    skip_before_filter :authenticate_user!, only: [:index]
    # ...
end

Then I can use this in my index route:

def index
    user  = nil

    # if using token authentication
    # token_user = nil

    caught = catch(:warden) do
        user = warden.authenticate :scope => :user

        # if using token authentication
        # token_user = authenticate_user_from_token!
    end

    if user # or token_user # if using token authentication
        # User is confirmed
    elsif caught and caught[:message] == :unconfirmed
        # User is unconfirmed
    else
        # User is not signed in
    end
end