How to redirect page after confirmation in Devise

I figured it out. I'm not sure if this changes with the update Devise did yesterday in making Devise::Mailer put most of its functionality into a module. (See the code and ticket for more information).

Basically it boils down to not being able to access the session inside of a mailer view. Therefore you have to pass the redirect as a variable. Devise uses an after_create method on your resource (User in my case) which then sends the confirmation email. This meant I couldn't just pass the session variable directly to the mailer. Thus I feel like this is a pretty nasty work-around in order to get this functionality, but here is the code:

To get the redirect_to variable into the mailer you have to add a variable to the user, thus:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  …
  attr_accessor :return_to
  …
end

Then you have to set that variable when you create the user for the first time.

I already had a custom controller setup for registration. (See Devise' Readme on how to set this up, or see @ramc's answer for direction). But it was relatively easy to do this part, I just added it to the parameters and let the rest take care of itself.

class RegistrationsController < Devise::RegistrationsController
  def create
    params[:user][:return_to] = session[:user_return_to] if session[:user_return_to]
    …
    super
  end
end

Now the user has a variable return_to which is set. We just need to access that in the confirmation_instructions email. I've already rewritten part of confirmation_instructions.html.erb so inside there I just added:

<% if @resource.return_to %>
  <%= link_to 'Confirm my account', confirmation_url(@resource, :confirmation_token => @resource.confirmation_token, :redirect_to => @resource.return_to) %>
<% else %>
  <%= link_to 'Confirm my account', confirmation_url(@resource, :confirmation_token => @resource.confirmation_token) %>
<% end %>

(For those who are new to this, @resource is the variable Devise uses to define your user).

Now once the user clicks on that link we need to redirect them. @ramc's before filter works well for this:

class ConfirmationsController < Devise::ConfirmationsController
  before_filter :set_redirect_location, :only => :show

  def set_redirect_location
    session[:user_return_to] = params[:redirect_to] if params[:redirect_to]
  end
end

That will take care of the case where a new user goes to a protected page then signs up, clicks on the confirmation link and is properly redirected to the protected page.

Now we just need to take care of the case where a user does the above, but instead of clicking on the link, they try to go back to the protected page. In this case they are asked to sign-up/sign-in. They sign-in and then are asked to confirm their email and are given the option of resending the confirmation email. They put in their email and now we need to put the redirect_to variable in that new confirmation email.

To do this we need to modify the ConfirmationController, similarly to how we did the RegistrationController. This time we need to modify the create method. The way it works out of the box is to call a class method on the user called send_confirmation_instructions. We want to rewrite that method so we can pass the return_to variable into it.

class ConfirmationsController < Devise::ConfirmationsController
  def create
    self.resource = resource_class.send_confirmation_instructions(params[resource_name],session[:user_return_to])

    if resource.errors.empty?
      set_flash_message(:notice, :send_instructions) if is_navigational_format?
      respond_with resource, :location => after_resending_confirmation_instructions_path_for(resource_name)
    else
      respond_with_navigational(resource){ render_with_scope :new }
    end
  end
end

The only thing different than what comes with Devise is that first line of create, we pass two variables in. Now we need to rewrite that method:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def self.send_confirmation_instructions(attributes={},redirect=nil)
    confirmable = find_or_initialize_with_errors(confirmation_keys, attributes, :not_found)
    confirmable.return_to = redirect if confirmable.persisted?
    confirmable.resend_confirmation_token if confirmable.persisted?
    confirmable
  end
end

confirmable becomes an instance of User (the current user based on email). So we just need to set return_to.

That's it.

Looking at the way stored_location_for has been implemented in lib/devise/controllers/helpers.rb

def stored_location_for(resource_or_scope)
   scope = Devise::Mapping.find_scope!(resource_or_scope)
   session.delete("#{scope}_return_to")
end

It is possible to otherwise access it using session['user_return_to']. In your case, you would lose that session object because when the user clicks on the link from the confirmation mail, it might be a new session that is spawned.

You can implement whatever you have suggested as a before filter:

class Users::ConfirmationsController < Devise::ConfirmationsController 
     before_filter :set_redirect_location, :only => :show

     def set_redirect_location
         session["user_return_to"] = params[:redirect_to] if params[:redirect_to]
     end
end

In addition to this, you will have to modify the route to make devise call your controller instead of its own confirmation controller.

devise_for :users,
           :controllers => { :confirmations => 'users/confirmations'}

Hope this helps :)

Note: The code snippets are not complete and only contain relevant details.