Devise refused to login but no error is given

Question

Login for the rest of the accounts in my devise system are functioning normally (seemingly). But one of the accounts is acting strange.

This user reset her password, which worked, and logged her in. But after she logged out. She was not able to log back in using that password. But instead of getting any error, the login page submitted and she was taken right back to the login form except no errors were displayed.

This continued to occur so she tried re-setting the password again to something different. Once again she was logged in after clicking the email link and once again after signing out, she was not able to sign back in with the new password. And again she was shown no error messages. It just appeared to refresh the login page.

She tried logging in with the new password on both Chrome and IE and had the same behavior so I don't think it's a browser issue.

She sent me the username and password and everything works fine on my computer which is running the same chrome browser version as hers.

We're using Rails 3.1.3 and the newest version of Devise.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This sounds like a programmer error. The user has some login state that shouldn't exist (IE conflicting variables). Oddly enough Google has a decent number of these with pages littered throughout their enterprise and they exist do to a lack of checks (I'm an GoogleApps user and this frequently happens to me in the form of an infinite 403 redirect loop).

Clearing the cookies and serverside settings for the user will likely solve the problem indefinitely but I'd recomend going through your code and making sure that you haven't allowed something to be set and forgotten to unset it once the user is authenticated.