How To: Add an Admin Role

First generate the model and migration for the Admin role:

$ rails generate devise Admin

Configure your Admin model

class Admin < ActiveRecord::Base devise :database_authenticatable, :trackable, :timeoutable, :lockable end

Adjust the generated migration:

Devise 2.2:

class DeviseCreateAdmins < ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up create_table(:admins) do |t| t.string :email, :null => false, :default => "" t.string :encrypted_password, :null => false, :default => "" t.integer :sign_in_count, :default => 0 t.datetime :current_sign_in_at t.datetime :last_sign_in_at t.string :current_sign_in_ip t.string :last_sign_in_ip t.integer :failed_attempts, :default => 0 # Only if lock strategy is :failed_attempts t.string :unlock_token # Only if unlock strategy is :email or :both t.datetime :locked_at t.timestamps end end

def self.down drop_table :admins end end

Earlier Devise Versions:

class DeviseCreateAdmins < ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up create_table(:admins) do |t| t.database_authenticatable :null => false t.trackable t.lockable t.timestamps end end

def self.down drop_table :admins end end

Routes should be automatically updated to contain the following

devise_for :admins

Enjoy! Option 2 - Adding an admin attribute

The easiest way of supporting an admin role is to simply add an attribute that can be used to identify administrators.

$ rails generate migration add_admin_to_users admin:boolean

Add default: false to the line that adds the admin column to the table.

Your migration will now look like this:

class AddAdminToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration def change add_column :users, :admin, :boolean, default: false end end

Next, execute the migration script:

$ rake db:migrate

Now you're able to identify administrators:

if current_user.admin? # do something end

If the page could potentially not have a current_user set then:

if current_user.try(:admin?) # do something end

With the above way if current_user were nil, then it would still work without raising an undefined method `admin?' for nil:NilClass exception.

The code below can be used to grant admin status to the current user.

current_user.update_attribute :admin, true