Controller Integration

Concerns

This gem includes a Rails concern called DeviseTokenAuth::Concerns::SetUserByToken. Include this concern to provide access to controller methods such as authenticate_user!, user_signed_in?, etc.

The concern also runs an after_action that changes the auth token after each request.

It is recommended to include the concern in your base ApplicationController so that all children of that controller include the concern as well.

Concern example:

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include DeviseTokenAuth::Concerns::SetUserByToken
end

Methods

This gem provides access to all of the following devise helpers:

Method	Description
before_action :authenticate_user!	Returns a 401 error unless a User is signed-in.
current_user	Returns the currently signed-in User, or nil if unavailable.
user_signed_in?	Returns true if a User is signed in, otherwise false.
devise_token_auth_group	Operate on multiple user classes as a group. Read more
update_auth_header	After action that updates the header with the new token, it's included by default, you should skip it if you are destroying the user

Note that if the model that you're trying to access isn't called User, the helper method names will change. For example, if the user model is called Admin, the methods would look like this:

• before_action :authenticate_admin!

• admin_signed_in?

• current_admin

Example: limit access to authenticated users

# app/controllers/test_controller.rb
class TestController < ApplicationController
  before_action :authenticate_user!

  def members_only
    render json: {
      data: {
        message: "Welcome #{current_user.name}",
        user: current_user
      }
    }, status: 200
  end
end

Token Header Format

The authentication information should be included by the client in the headers of each request. The headers follow the RFC 6750 Bearer Token format:

Authentication headers example:

"access-token": "wwwww",
"token-type":   "Bearer",
"client":       "xxxxx",
"expiry":       "yyyyy",
"uid":          "zzzzz"

The authentication headers (each one is a seperate header) consists of the following params:

param	description
access-token	This serves as the user's password for each request. A hashed version of this value is stored in the database for later comparison. This value should be changed on each request.
client	This enables the use of multiple simultaneous sessions on different clients. (For example, a user may want to be authenticated on both their phone and their laptop at the same time.)
expiry	The date at which the current session will expire. This can be used by clients to invalidate expired tokens without the need for an API request.
uid	A unique value that is used to identify the user. This is necessary because searching the DB for users by their access token will make the API susceptible to timing attacks.

The authentication headers required for each request will be available in the response from the previous request. If you are using the ng-token-auth AngularJS module or the jToker jQuery plugin, this functionality is already provided.