Rails, Devise and custom User models

Devise is an excellent solution for user authentication in a Rails application.

Ryan Bates has done two great Railscasts episodes on Devise - #209 Introducing Devise and #210 Customizing Devise.

The default Devise configuration uses a simple sign up process - you give it an email address, a password and password confirmation. Follow the installation instructions and it should just all work.

But in my current application I need a bit more. I want the user to enter their first and last names, I want to assign a role and I want to link that individual user to a company account. Devise is capable of handling all this but the README on github doesn't really explain how and I, for one, get a bit nervous messing with the code of my authentication solution.

It turns out to be incredibly easy as long as you don't try and be too clever.

Be going into the steps given below, I recommend trying out a basic off the shelf Devise installation in a test application first just so you know that it works on your machine and you can see what files it creates, etc.

In these steps I'm going to use Devise with a User model that contains some custom fields.

1. Before creating your own User model, do a basic Devise installation into your app

$ gem install devise  # or in Rails 3 add it to your Gemfile, and 'bundle'
$ rails generate devise:install  # follow the instructions given
$ rails generate devise User
$ rails generate devise:views # this generates sign_in, etc views under 'app/views/devise' - not user!

2. Modify your User model by adding custom fields to attr_accessible
Here I'm adding :first_name, :last_name, :active, :role

attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me,
        :first_name, :last_name, :active, :role

Add your own validations, etc to the model. For testing, at least, require the presence of at least on of your custom fields.

3. Modify your Migration for the User table and run the migration
In my case I added these lines:

     t.string :first_name
      t.string :last_name
      t.boolean :active, :default => true
      t.string :role, :default => 'user'

Run the migration with 'rake db:migrate'

4. Modify your Sign_up form
This lives in app/views/devise/registrations/new.html.erb
NOTE: You can have Devise install its views under app/views/user but I prefer to keep Devise specific views in their own directory
Add fields to the form for your custom fields e.g.

<%= f.text_field :first_name %>
etc. 

5. Try it out - sign up a new user
Go to the URL /users/sign_up
Your input to the custom fields should go into the database and any validations against custom fields which fail should give you the proper error messages and highlighting in the sign_up form
In my experience this 'just worked'

6. But the whole reason you want custom fields in the User model is to work directly with them...

For this you need a User controller and views. Devise does not give you either of these.
Either run a scaffold generator and skip the model or copy over another controller and set of views.
Now you have the regular set of actions for your model.
Go to /users and you should see the user(s) that you added, /users/1 will show you that user with whatever columns you choose to display.

In my case I display my custom fields and the email in my show and index actions and just ignore the rest of the Devise specific fields.

You want to be careful with the User new/create/edit/update actions. If you create a new user via that path then they will have no password, etc so you might want to remove new/create. The edit/update actions are useful if a user want to change their name and other 'profile' information, but don't mess with the Devise-specific fields via this route.

Basically, the Devise side of things and your custom User model can coexist quite happily. Make sure you don't mess with the fields that Devise requires and don't use the same column names.

I would also avoid using virtual attributes in the custom fields. I tried this and couldn't get it to work. Not a big deal for my case.


When I started integrating Devise into my app I had a sinking feeling that the custom fields would be a real problem. Quite the opposite - this turned out to be really easy.

Great kudos to the folks at Platforma Tec - Jose Valim and colleagues for a really nice piece of work.