--- title: Devise authentication with Rails 6 slug: devise-authentication-with-rails-6 published_at: 2021-03-08 18:00:30 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:25 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, we set up a vanilla configuration for devise authentication with Ruby on Rails 6. devise is a ruby gem for quickly implementing user authentication in a ruby application. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [Devise Authentication with Rails, Ruby on Rails authentication, Devise Auth, Auth, Authentication, Authenticating with Devise, Setting up devise, Setting up devise for authentication, Rails 6, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails Auth, Registration, Rails sign up, Rails registration, Letter opener, Ruby Gem, letter_opener gem, devise gem, How to setup authentication with Rails, How to setup authentication with rails 6, rails user authentication, ruby on rails devise authentication] views: 13271 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/devise-authentication-with-rails-6 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6iJLlmUog youtube_id: zl6iJLlmUog embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/zl6iJLlmUog thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zl6iJLlmUog/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Devise authentication with Rails 6 *Published: March 08, 2021* *Views: 13271* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6iJLlmUog) [![Devise authentication with Rails 6](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zl6iJLlmUog/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6iJLlmUog) ## Description In this episode, we set up a vanilla configuration for devise authentication with Ruby on Rails 6. devise is a ruby gem for quickly implementing user authentication in a ruby application. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/video_automation Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjav_dev Feedback: https://forms.gle/Q31hhjJGsMrvY4mL6 It turns out there's a really excellent tool called TubeBuddy that already exists and does most of what I was planning to build. I've started using TubeBuddy in the past few months and really like it. If you use this link to buy a license, I'll get a small cut for being an affiliate: https://www.tubebuddy.com/cjavdev. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript welcome back friends in the last episode we deployed to production we deployed to heroku in this episode we're going to take a look at how to set up devise to authenticate users and deal with uh yeah deal with just user user authentication getting them logged in confirmed password resetting etc so let's let's take a look devise is a gem for managing authentication it's built for rails and it supports a whole bunch of different modules so you can you can authenticate with the database with usernames and passwords you can authenticate with omniauth which allows you to use oauth to authenticate in different services it has support for confirming recovering registering remembering and tracking timing out validating and locking so a whole bunch of different things that you can do with devise now generally i actually tend to and prefer to in most cases roll my own authentication but that is definitely not recommended because there's a lot of security things to think about when you're working with authentication and so what we're going to do is walk through the process of how you set up and get started with devise today the first thing we need to do is install this gem so we're going to open up the gem file and at the very bottom i'm just going to drop in devise now one of the the um tools that devise has is the ability to send confirmation email to the user so that when they are signing up they can receive an email and click a confirmation link and then you can on you can like be confident that that is the user's email and so in order to do that there's another gem that i want to use in development called letter opener and um that is a gem that was created by ryan bates originally like the old school rails cast that you may have seen um yeah the author of that created this super helpful gem that's useful in development called letter opener so i'm going to drop that in there and say bundle install and this will install both device and letter opener and then the next thing i want to do is generate devise install so we say rails g device colon install this will install devise and it does a couple different things so we can take a look at what that's doing so it's creating an initializer and it's configuring or setting up some basic locale so you can actually do this with different languages so in the in the development environment we need to set up our config action mailer default url options in the last video this was one of the things i was trying to find development.rb so that our url4 worked and so here we go we're going to drop it in here the other thing we need to do is when using letter opener we need to specify that letter opener is the way that we want to deliver email in development so i'm going to copy these two arguments so this says when i'm if you try to send an email in development use letter opener it's really cool it opens in the browser as an html view of what the email would have been that's like sent to the customer okay so those are the two steps we need to start with what else does devise tell us we need to do we need a root route we have one already that's great then we want to add these to our layouts application html erb layouts application html erb i'm going to drop them at the top here and a couple couple interesting things we can do in this view so uh devise comes with some user with some with some helpers and so one of them is like if uh x um is authenticated i think uh where x is the the type of model that you want to use and we don't actually have any concept of a user model yet or of a user because i've just been kind of like hacking away as if i was the only user so i think this is if user is authenticated let's take a look so oh signed in user signed in if user signed in so if the user signed in we'll show them these links otherwise we'll show them a link that is purely to log in so users sign in or something like that i think and we'll say sign in okay this might be user i can't remember sign in okay yeah so resource slash sign in should work so yeah back to getting started here so we we did this we set up our url options now we need to generate a devise model so we say rails g device user in my case i'm going to call it user in your case it could be account it could be team it could be whatever the model is that's going to represent the the type of actor that is authenticating to your system that's what you want to name this thing and so this is going to create a new model because i don't have a user model yet and in the migration we can take a look at what it's doing so it's going to be database authenticatable so we're going to have people log in with email and password and we can say like okay let's just enable some of these other things so trackable confirmable lockable sure like not not a huge deal and then we'll we'll enable these indexes also and call that good so we can say rake db migrate and that will run that migration to create the table in the database and the table already exists because i went through this already so uh let's see so rake um let's see rails rails db drop db create db migrate db seed okay let's see so i went through this whole process and recorded how to do this and then i forgot that my uh for some reason it wasn't capturing the screen it was just capturing my face the whole time i was like that's probably not that interesting let me reshoot that okay so now that we have the users in the database let's go edit the model the user.rb model here and so it like there's there's this devise method that you can call at the top level that like like specifies all the different components of device that you want to use so uh we're going to just use confirmable lockable um trackable we don't need omni author because we're actually using we're actually not using omni auth we're using something else in order to authenticate to youtube so this should be good for our user model um okay and then if we refresh our page and just take a look at what's going on now rails s so restart the server and there's an error in our syntax so what's going on application html erb if the user signed in double question mark we don't need double question mark okay so if we try to go to like the root route which is used to show all the videos and hit enter we are dropped into the videos controller but now we see a sign in link so that we can click sign in and i think it's supposed to be users sign in okay so let's go fix that users sign in okay so refresh click sign in and we're just we're here we're log we're we're dropped into this login page we could probably say like only show this if we're not on the login page but whatever it's fine now if we click sign up we'll enter an email address and just password password and click sign up now this is so cool oh my gosh so this is from uh this is from letter opener this is what the email would look like when you're confirming your account so this is exactly what um what they would receive from your rails application the email that they would receive and we're able to view this because of letter opener very cool so if we click confirm my account we're now confirmed and we can log in so we can just say like uh let's see password and then we can log in and now we're in we're successfully signed in so that's super cool now i don't have any videos to show anymore because we just dropped the database and remigrated it so before we do this connect to youtube bit i want to set up the association between each video and the youtube channel that we're pulling videos in from but i want to do that in a separate episode because what we've done so far is actually almost all that we need to do for authentication so i want to go back to the application control or application html erb and if you're signed in right now we don't actually have a way for you to sign out so i want to try um link two let's see sign out and now we need to figure out what we're actually passing as like the the link that we're gonna click on that will sign you out and the method is actually going to be delete so we want to send a delete request to some path now when i was going through the docs here i couldn't actually find quickly the way that you sign out so there's like a sign out method um and you can like rename it to log out or whatever like this configuring your routes allows you to configure it so that you can call it you can call it log out or you can call it something different but but what i wanted to do was try to figure out like how do i actually create a button or create a link or create a something that will allow you to take the action to sign out and there isn't really clear instructions in the readme so the way that it works is we have to first figure out what is the route that we want to send this request to and so i the i took the hint that it has sign underscore out in here as a thing and so then i can say rails routes pipe rep sign out so rails routes is just going to list all the different routes and some information about them and so we can find this one result that says the name of the route here it says it's it accepts delete requests to slash user sign out and so this is going to call the devise it's inside of the device namespace and it's going to use the sessions controllers destroy action so that's like what actually logs the user out and so if i copy this destroy user session and go to application html erb and then i'm using this link to i think i can say like destroy user session path and i don't know if this method delete thing is going to work i think i saw this work for some javascript thing at some time so let's let's see let's see what this actually created so if we inspect this um it has a link data dash method delete i have a feeling that some rails javascript magic might happen here let's see so if we click sign out boom signed out successfully and all we see now is sign in but we're able to still see the videos controller and so i don't want anyone to be able to actually see the videos controller i'm going to go to videos controller and now at the top we can add a before action and this is what's the name of it here before action authenticate underscore and the name of your um your thing so user bang now what this will do is this kind of implements a method something like this authenticate user which says like redirect uh to the like login page unless um there is a current user like unless there's a current user that's logged in redirect to the login page now if there's a redirect action that happens inside of a before like a redirect method is called inside of a before action that will execute and redirect before your controller action is run so this allows you to sort of like prevent your controller actions from executing by using some filter some before before filter and this actually used to be called before underscore filter now it's called before action um and i get those mixed up sometimes still all right so you need to sign in before continuing so if i try to just go to like slash dropped into here or like slash videos i'm dropped into here now if i try to go to slash like templates or slash what is it presenters i'm able to still get to this presenter view because we haven't protected that view so we're going to want to add that to all of the different controllers that we want to protect so i'm going to drop this into description template and so there's actually a different way you can do this also so rather than needing to remember to add your before action to every single application or every single controller that you're implementing instead if you just add it into your application controller um let's see before action uh what is it called uh authenticate user so this because we're adding it to the application controller and all of our other controllers inherit from application controller now we shouldn't be able to get into anything so you need to sign in or sign up before before proceeding cool now if we tried to go to like slash description templates right this is another route okay cool we're redirected we have to be signed in to see like any of those pages so if we were to sign in then we're able to see description templates we're able to see present presenters and we're able to see the home page with with videos etc etc so this should work fine you might get into a little bit of a sticky situation if you are for instance trying to run some code where the user isn't authenticated or something but for the most part that should allow you to prevent access for someone who's signed out so if we go to the presenters page and we click sign out now we can't like get back to the presenters page without signing in so uh pretty handy and there's a whole bunch of other stuff that comes in here too so like forgot your password send me reset instructions again using letter opener it opens up the password password reset so we can say change my password password to pass word to change my password so that's cool that works i think i said one i said password in one password like uh did you mean me you talking to me no i'm not talking to you uh okay so this is this is cool i'm pretty happy with this and in fact like i'm gonna deploy this so that like folks aren't messing around with that app on production so that is how you quickly spin up authentication with rails using devise thanks for watching and if you enjoyed it please give it a like and i would absolutely appreciate a subscribe as it both of those actions help other people find this content uh yeah so i hope you're having a great day and we'll see you next time --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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