Customizing Devise error messages in Rails 3?

Question

I am using devise to handle authentication. Overall I like it, but I'd like to customize the error display a bit. Right now I've got the following in my view.

<div class="field <% if resource.errors[:email].present? %>error<% end %>">
  <%= f.label :email, "Email:" %><br />
  <% if resource.errors[:email].present? %>
    <ul>
      <% resource.errors[:email].each do |msg| %>
        <li><%= msg %></li>
      <% end %>
    </ul>
  <% end %>
  <%= f.text_field :email, :class => "text" %>
</div>

But when there is a problem with the email, the message displayed is as follows: is invalid. That's not very user friendly, but I can't find where this message is being set. It doesn't appear to be in devise.en.yml, but perhaps I'm overlooking something.

Any idea where I can customize the error messages?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can configure the error messages in the locales file at: /config/locales/devise.en.yml

Which should have something like below code and which you can easily modify to your liking:

en:  
  errors:  
    messages:  
      not_found: "not found"  
      already_confirmed: "was already confirmed"  
      not_locked: "was not locked"  

  devise:  
    failure:  
      unauthenticated: 'You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.'  
      unconfirmed: 'You have to confirm your account before continuing.'  
      locked: 'Your account is locked.'  
      invalid: 'OH NOES! ERROR IN TEH EMAIL!'  
      invalid_token: 'Invalid authentication token.'  
      timeout: 'Your session expired, please sign in again to continue.'  
      inactive: 'Your account was not activated yet.'  
    sessions:  
      signed_in: 'Signed in successfully.'  
      signed_out: 'Signed out successfully.'  

For a more detailed explanation, check out this url (with screenshots). The Customizing Error Messages section, in the article.

Answer 2

If you want to change the messages for the customs validations added by Device, check Christian's answer.

Otherwise, if the validation you want to customize is a standard validation like email format, you don't need to remove the Devise validations and replace them with your own. A better way of handling this is to make use of the default error messages precedence listed in the Rails guides and override the error message for a particular field and a particular validation.

For this particular question, the key that you need to add in config/locales/en.yml in order to change is invalid with a custom message for email errors is activerecord.errors.models.user.attributes.email.invalid (where user is the name of the model):

en:
  activerecord:
    errors:
      models:
        user:
          attributes:
            email:
              invalid: "custom invalid message"

Rails will search for a message to show for a validation in the following order:

activerecord.errors.models.[model_name].attributes.[attribute_name]
activerecord.errors.models.[model_name]
activerecord.errors.messages
errors.attributes.[attribute_name]
errors.messages

Answer 3

These validations are all defined in the validations module, and use the default Rails error messages.

You can override these in your model.

validates_format_of :email, :with=>email_regexp, :allow_blank => true, :message=>"new error message here"