Rake routes not showing the route, but it exists when hardcoded

Question

I'm using Devise and Omniauth for my login process. For some reason, I can access the route "users/auth/facebook" or "users/auth/twitter" just fine. But they don't show up when I do rake routes, so I have no idea what the helper method to get these paths is (e.g. something_something_path). Can someone help me out?

I can't show all of my routes, but I can say that the only route that matches "/users/auth/..." that's showing up is this one (from rake routes):

 user_omniauth_callback        /users/auth/:action/callback(.:format)    {:action=>/(?!)/, :controller=>"users/omniauth_callbacks"}

BTW, when I say I "can access the route just fine", I mean this works (redirects me correctly to facebook or twitter):

<%= link_to "Connect", "users/auth/facebook" %>

Also, the routes should be the default Devise omniauth routes for the user model

davetapley davetapley · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-31T15:28:47

With regard to why this doesn't show up in rake routes, first note how the task is implemented. It is part of railties, and it gets the routes to show as such:

Rails.application.routes.routes

So we can see that it is asking the Rails.application for its routes.

Next note that the Omniauth gem "is a flexible authentication system utilizing Rack middleware".

Because it uses Rack middleware it does not 'know' anything about the Rails.application used by rake routes, and so its routes don't appear in that task.

You can get a good introduction to Rack middleware in this Railcast.

Delving a little deeper we can see from rake middleware that OmniAuth::Builder appears before your rails app in the stack. So how does it handle the auth/twitter route?

It does so by checking for a request_path in its call, you can see the check here, and you can see how the request_path is built here (path_prefix is auth by default, and name in your case is twitter.

When using Omniauth with Devise, the path_prefix is set automatically, as noted here.

Rake routes not showing the route, but it exists when hardcoded

2 Answers