Acknowledging that I haven't had a chance to try the new Rails 8 auth stack... over the last decade I've gone from being a Devise hater to a Devise lover.
Yes, it can seem esoteric and magical (in the bad way) until you wrap your head around the idioms and design philosophy. There's a lot of functionality that happens unless you override it. I fully get that this rubs a lot of people who aren't in the pool the wrong way.
However, in addition to the impressive selection of modular capabilities mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's a very bright light that goes on when you realize that you can make powerful changes to the way the library works by reopening a few controller classes and defining your own methods.
My strong advice for anyone looking at Devise and perhaps feeling stumped is to open up https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/tree/main/app/controlle... and spend some tens of minutes looking at how the library does what it does. These controller - especially sessions and registrations - contain all of the business logic driving the "magic". Not only do they reveal themselves as relatively simple and well thought out, all of those yield calls mean that you can call those methods while passing a block to them. Whatever is in that block will be evaluated inside of that method when it runs.
The people who designed Devise put a lot of thought into this stuff. When you get it, you suddenly don't want to be without it.
Yes, it can seem esoteric and magical (in the bad way) until you wrap your head around the idioms and design philosophy. There's a lot of functionality that happens unless you override it. I fully get that this rubs a lot of people who aren't in the pool the wrong way.
However, in addition to the impressive selection of modular capabilities mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's a very bright light that goes on when you realize that you can make powerful changes to the way the library works by reopening a few controller classes and defining your own methods.
My strong advice for anyone looking at Devise and perhaps feeling stumped is to open up https://github.com/heartcombo/devise/tree/main/app/controlle... and spend some tens of minutes looking at how the library does what it does. These controller - especially sessions and registrations - contain all of the business logic driving the "magic". Not only do they reveal themselves as relatively simple and well thought out, all of those yield calls mean that you can call those methods while passing a block to them. Whatever is in that block will be evaluated inside of that method when it runs.
The people who designed Devise put a lot of thought into this stuff. When you get it, you suddenly don't want to be without it.