devise-twitter

Devise-twitter adds Sign in via Twitter and Connect your account to Twitter functionality to your devise app.

It requires at least Devise 1.1 and ONLY works with Rails 3.

Current status

Devise-twitter currently supports Sign in via Twitter and Connect your account to Twitter, but no proper API for Connect your account to Twitter exists so far.

This plugin is in use in an upcoming product and continues to be improved.

Installation

Simply add devise-twitter to your Gemfile and bundle it up:

gem 'devise-twitter'

Run the generator, supplying the name of the model (e.g. User)

$ rails generate devise:twitter user

Add your OAuth credentials to config/initializers/devise_twitter.rb

Devise::Twitter.setup do |config|
  config.consumer_key = <YOUR CONSUMER KEY HERE>
  config.consumer_secret = <YOUR CONSUMER SECRET HERE>
  config.scope = :user
end

Modify your user model like so

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # To use devise-twitter don't forget to include the :twitter_oauth module:
  # e.g. devise :database_authenticatable, ... , :twitter_oauth

  # IMPORTANT: If you want to support sign in via twitter you MUST remove the
  #            :validatable module, otherwise the user will never be saved
  #            since it's email and password is blank.
  #            :validatable checks only email and password so it's safe to remove

  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :token_authenticatable, :confirmable, :lockable and :timeoutable
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable :twitter_oauth

  # Setup accessible (or protected) attributes for your model
  attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me
end

Modify the generated routes (in config/routes.rb) to your liking

Application.routes.draw do
  devise_for :user do
    match '/user/sign_in/twitter' => Devise::Twitter::Rack::Signin
    match '/user/connect/twitter' => Devise::Twitter::Rack::Connect
  end
  ...

Run the generated migration

$ rake db:migrate

Signing in via Twitter

When signing in via Twitter, after authorizing access on www.twitter.com, devise-twitter will sign in an existing user or create a new one, if no user with these oauth credentials exists.

Connect your account to Twitter

Devise-twitter supports adding Twitter credentials to an existing user account (e.g. one that registered via email/password) but currently the API to expose this feature is far from perfect:

After navigating to /user/connect/twitter and authorizing access on www.twitter.com, devise-twitter checks if there is another user with the same twitter handle. If not devise-twitter adds twitter handle and oauth credentials to the current user and saves.

If another user with the same twitter handle is found devise-twitter sets the session variable warden.user.twitter.connected_user.key to the id of this user. Your application can check if this variable is set and display an option to merge the two users.

if connected_user = session['warden.user.twitter.connected_user.key'].present?
  connected_user = User.find(connected_user)

  # Ask user if she/he wants to merge her/his accounts
  # (or just go ahead and merge them)
end

If you have any idea how to improve it, please message me.

Database changes

The generated migration adds three fields to your user model:

change_table(:users) do |t|
  t.column :twitter_handle, :string
  t.column :twitter_oauth_token, :string
  t.column :twitter_oauth_secret, :string
end

add_index :users, :twitter_handle, :unique => true
add_index :users, [:twitter_oauth_token, :twitter_oauth_secret]

Currently the names of these fields are hard coded, but making them customizable is on the roadmap.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to

• Daniel Neighman for creating warden, the framework Devise uses
• Jose Valim for creating Devise
• Pelle Braendgaard for implementing oauth support in Ruby
• Roman Gonzalez for creating warden_oauth, the framework devise-twitter uses
• all the other giants who's shoulders this project stands on

Meta

• Code: git clone http://github.com/MSch/devise-twitter
• Bugs: http://github.com/MSch/devise-twitter/issues
• Gems: http://rubygems.org/gems/devise-twitter