Whitelisting with devise

Question

I am using devise to manage user authentication in my rails app. Devise is really great for that.

However I have a special requirement for my application: A user must be whitelisted before he can register as a User.

So there is a admin which creates a list of allowed emails. A user registers with a email and if the email is in the whitelist table he will be registered. If however, the mail is not in the whitelist, the registration should be aborted with a message like "You are not yet invited".

Do you have an idea how that could be solved with devise?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would just use model validation. I'm assuming your User class has the devise method

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable #etc

  before_validation :whitelisted

  def whitelisted
    unless celebrityemail.include? email
      errors.add :email, "#{email} is not on our invitation list"  
    end
  end 

end

Answer 2

What you can do is create your own registrations controller and extend the device one like:

class MyRegistrationController < Devise::RegistrationsController
  def create
    # do your checks
    super
  end
end

see: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/blob/master/app/controllers/devise/registrations_controller.rb And: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-to:-Customize-routes-to-user-registration-pages

Good luck!

Answer 3

I did create my own controller as suggested:

class Users::RegistrationsController < Devise::RegistrationsController
    def create
        email = params[:user][:email]
        if Admin::Whitelist.find_by_email(email) != nil
            super
        else
            build_resource

            set_flash_message :error, "You are not permitted to sign up yet. If you have already payed your registration fee, try again later."
            render_with_scope :new
        end
    end
end

I placed it in app/users/registrations_controller.rb. Then I had to copy the devise registration views into app/views/users/registrations because the default views were not used.

It is working now, thanks for your help