How to programmatically sign in a user through Devise in Rails

Question

I need to have a custom mechanism for signing in using Devise with Rails 4. So I found the sign_in method in Devise's test helpers section of their documentation:

sign_in @user          # sign_in(resource)

But is that the proper way to sign someone in from the web? In particular, will it do all the things Devise does when a user signs in, like recording the date/time stamps, IP addresses, sign in counts, etc? Or is this just for testing purposes?

Answer 1

It is the proper and standard way to programatically sign a user in. Looking at the devise login code sessions#create you can see they use this method as well.

Answer 2

Devise offers a bunch of helpers, two of which are these:

sign_in(resource_or_scope, *args)
sign_in_and_redirect(resource_or_scope, *args)

You can use these from any controller.

If using sign_in already works for you but leaves the user on a blank page, check your logfile to see if there is a redirect going on, and where it redirects to. Or just make the redirect explicit by using the second of the helpers above.

References:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/8123646/2034097

Answer 3

Long story short: Yes, sign_in @user does all the things that devise would normally do when a user signs in. It could be useful, for example, allowing an Administrator to sign in as one of their users.

How To: Sign in as another user if you are an admin