How To: Use devise inside a mountable engine

How to use Devise Inside a Mountable Engine

Installing Devise in a mountable engine is nearly identical to installing Devise in an application. However, there are a few additional configuration options that need to be adjusted.

Installation

Installing Devise in an engine follows the same steps as the general installation instructions, but we'll be running the commands from our engine's directory and benefiting from the namespaced rails helper there.

Add Devise to the engine's dependencies in your gemspec:

Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.add_dependency "devise"
end

Generate the config files:

rails generate devise:install

And generate a model if you need to:

rails generate devise MODEL

Configuration

You'll need to direct Devise to use your engine's router. To do this, set Devise.router_name in config/initializers/devise.rb. It should be a symbol containing the name of the mountable engine's named-route set. For example, if your engine is namespaced as MyEngine:

Devise.setup do |config|
  config.router_name = :my_engine
end

Your user class is probably namespaced, so you'll need to pass that to the Devise helper in routes.rb:

MyEngine::Engine.routes.draw do
  devise_for :users, class_name: "MyEngine::User"
end

If your engine uses isolate_namespace, Devise will assume that all of its controllers reside in your engine rather than Devise. To correct this, add :module => :devise to the routes helper:

MyEngine::Engine.routes.draw do
  devise_for :users, class_name: "MyEngine::User", module: :devise
end

You probably want Devise's controllers to inherit from your engine's controller and not the main controller. Set this in config/initializers/devise.rb:

Devise.setup do |config|
  config.parent_controller = 'MyEngine::ApplicationController'
end

Finally, you'll need to require Devise in your engine. Add the following line to lib/my_engine.rb:

require 'devise'

NOTE: If you need to override the standard devise views (i.e. app/views/devise/sessions/new) you will want to require 'devise' before you require your engine. This way the view order will get configured appropriately and you can manage the overrides within your engine rather than the main app.

Example

http://github.com/BrucePerens/perens-instant-user/ is an example Rails Engine that adds Devise to the application while keeping most of the complexity of using Devise in the engine rather than your application.

It contains pre-defined mountable routes for Devise, and a pre-defined User model. Its installation steps are easier than those of stand-alone Devise. Unlike stand-alone Devise, you aren't advised to become a Ruby Wizard before installing it :-)