Rails 4, Devise, CanCan and rails_admin issues?

Question

I've been trying to set up rails_admin and to work with Rails 4.0.4, but unfortunately I ran across some issues. I have a devise generated User model with admin added as boolean afterwards. But even if the User is admin and needs to access the rails_admin panel, I get unauthorized access. It's like the current user cannot be passed in the ability.rb properly. Not sure if this is a Rails 4 issue or I'm doing something wrong.

Here's the code, with a little (ugly?) workaround that works, but I need a more elegant solution. Thanks.

ability.rb

class Ability
  include CanCan::Ability

  def initialize(user)
    # Define abilities for the passed in user here. For example:
    #
      user = User.current # guest user (not logged in)
      if user.admin? 
        can :manage, :all
        can :access, :rails_admin # needed to access RailsAdmin
        can :dashboard            # dashboard access
      else
        can :read, :all
      end
  end
end

user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable     

  def self.current
    Thread.current[:user]
  end      

  def self.current=(user)
    Thread.current[:user] = user
  end
end

application_controller.rb

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery with: :exception

  before_filter :set_current_user

  def set_current_user
    User.current = current_user
  end
end

And, of course, I have this in rails_admin.rb enabled.

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.authorize_with :cancan
end

Thanks!

Cancan is not ready for rails4 so far. You can use it, but you can expect some issues. — LuiGi

NewbieOnRails NewbieOnRails · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-14T12:51:10

Seems it works, but you first need a Devise model before adding rails_admin.

Also, this needs to be enabled in rails_admin initializer:

config.current_user_method(&:current_user)

Rails 4, Devise, CanCan and rails_admin issues?

2 Answers