Not a while ago, I started a side project to improve my engineering skills. I decided to make a web application with Rails + React stack. When it came to the authentication implementation, I went with the devise gem.

Devise is a powerful and customizable authentication library used for Rails applications. It comes with controllers, views and there are a few commands you need to run to make the authorization work.

However, my application had a different frontend framework (React) that handled the views and was supposed to make API calls to the Rails server to authenticate a user.

It took some research till finding a way to make the devise work with my configuration or, in other words, to make it accept and respond with JSON.

I learned a lot along the way, and I summarised my thoughts in an article. While researching, I got a suggestion to read an article from a blog that solved 99% of the devise configuration problem. There were comments under the article asking the author for a demo application. Unfortunately, it seems like author removed the article as I haven't found THE article which helped me :(

So, I decided to make a demo application myself, hoping that it would help people who are looking for a solution to the same configuration problems.

If you need a detailed explanation of the whole process, you can check out this article.

This application is for devise JSON API authentication demo purpose only. It has only a User model and devise gem installed and set up to work with JSON.

Install all gems bundle install

Create database rails db:create

Migrate database rails db:migrate

Start the app rails s

Check the endpoints rails routes --expanded to view all endpoints.
Don't forget to add { Accept: application/json } header to the request, or you won't see the JSON response ❗

URL: /api/v1/users
Method: POST
Body (JSON): {
    user: {
        email: [email protected],
        password: 123456,
        password_confirmation: 123456
    }
}

URL: /api/v1/users/sign_in
Method: POST
Body (JSON): {
    user: {
        email: [email protected],
        password: 123456
    }
}

MiniEngineer