It has been a couple weeks since we first bloged about Devise. At that time, we released version 0.1 and now, after some great feedback, some enhancements and a few bugs fixes, we reached Devise 0.4. So, what changed since then?

I’m lazy, you’re lazy

Devise now comes with generators, so adding up authentication to your app is even easier and quicker to do. First, let’s install Devise if you haven’t yet:

gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org/
gem install devise

And let’s add it to your environment, all together with warden:

config.gem "warden", :version => "0.5.1"
config.gem "devise", :version => "0.4.1"

After setting the gem up, the first generator can be invoked:

script/generate devise_install

And it simply places an initializer at config/initializers/devise.rb. You can check there all devise configuration options, so the initializer fits well as documentation tool too. Some of the new things you can configure since 0.1 release is the :confirm_within period (the time the user can access the site even without confirming his account) and :remember_for period (the time the remember token is valid).

After we configured Devise, we are able create our models. And how hard can that be if we have a generator? So just do:

script/generate devise User

It’s going to create a model User, add map.devise_for :users in routes.rb and a migration file. And before we proceed, we just need to configure default_url_options for ActionMailer in config/environments/development.rb (the config below is for development, be sure to properly set them for test and production too):

config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { :host => 'localhost:3000' }

And have at least a route named root in our config/routes.rb (by default, devise will look for user_root_path, if none is defined, is uses root_path):

map.root :controller => "your_controller"

Now we just need to run migrations and we will be able to create our first user in the console:

User.create!(:email => "your@email.com", :password => "secret")

Now just start your web server and you will be able to sign your user in at /users/sign_in, request for another confirmation code to be sent, request a code to reset your password and so forth.

Just remember that Devise does not say anything about the sign up process, that’s why you have to create your users in console.

Customization

We also know that you want to customize your views, to use something like Formtastic instead of the default markup. Well, guess who is here to help you?

Generators! The command below will make a copy of all devise views to your application, including locale files, for flash messages configuration:

script/generate devise_views

Laziness for all!

We know that you are lazy and not just with ActiveRecord. You want to be lazy with Datamapper, Mongomapper, Couchrest… This is why we worked on making Devise a little bit more agnostic, all your ORM has to do is have an API similar to ActiveRecord (finder and callbacks mainly).

Besides, if you already travelled a bit on Warden world, you will see that there is a lot more than Devise, including some strategies for OAuth. So we are also working on making Devise compatible with such new strategies as well, that’s why you can already see a config.warden hook on the initializer.

Deprecations

Since things are getting really easy, we need to ask something back from you. Just watch out for to deprecations in Devise 0.4.0:

1) :authenticable is a typo, so we fixed that renaming it to :authenticatable. If you used Devise 0.3.x, you could see some deprecation warnings. However, in Devise 0.4.0 such warnings were removed. Tip: be sure to check your migration!

2) We had a notifier inside Devise called Notifier. We decided to follow Clearance convention and rename it to DeviseMailer. You will need to change your views from notifier to devise_mailer and your locale yml from notifier to mailer.

We hope you enjoy Devise as much as we do! And, as previously, we also have an example app in Github to help you get started too.