Bad idea to alter external gem files in rails so I can use CSS in app?

Question

Did some research on how to style the views of the devise gem, didn't really find much so added some html and a render partial to the external libray to assist with styleing and to continue to offer my users some links. I get this gut instinct that it isn't the right way to do things however. Any online references provided would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

It depends on how you did it.

If you just edited the installed gem source, then perhaps that wasn't ideal.

But if you forked the Devise github repo, like 1,270 people have done as of today, you could easily track changes to the source and merge them with your version, contribute your changes back if you wanted, and you could build a gem of your own that you could use in style.