Devise routing: is there a way to remove a route from Rails.application.routes?

Question

devise_for creates routes including a DELETE route, which we want to remove, and devise_for doesn't support an :except or :only option.

How can I remove a route from Rails.application.routes? Either in the draw block, or afterward?

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Here are details of a bug, which was the reason we needed to remove the route.

• we were issuing a DELETE request to a custom UJS controller action

• in the controller action we were removing what we wanted to, then doing a 302 redirect. This was a bad idea, and we have since corrected it by returning some JSON instead.

• some clients, upon receiving the 302 would issue a new DELETE request to the redirect, which routes to a Devise delete route! Thereby inadvertantly deleting the person! Yikes. We were assuming this would be a GET. Bad assumption.

This bug has been fixed, but i would like to remove the route nonetheless.

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Here is what I did in the end, which was suggested by the bounty-winner in his quote from Jose´ Valim:

In config/routes.rb, I added this above the devise_for call, which sets up the rest of my 'people' routes:

delete '/person', :to => 'people#destroy'

Then in my existing people_controller.rb, I added a no-op method:

def destroy
  render :nothing => true
end

I'm still a little irked that there isn't a simple way to just remove the route from the RouteSet. Also, the delete route still exists for the devise controller, but it won't get called because rails looks for the first match in config/routes.rb and returns it.

Answer 1

Here is what Jose Valim (the author of devise) has to say on the subject:

There is no way to remove routes individually. Or you use :skip to remove all and draw the ones you need manually or you overwrite this routes by defining a route to the same path first in your config/ routes.rb

So the short answer to your question is no, you can't delete that one route. You can of course try doing things like patching the devise_for method, but that would be a somewhat involved undertaking (a day or several worth of effort). I'd just use the :skip option, then implement the routes you do want for that controller and leave off the one that you don't.