Is there a solution for Rails Gem Devise to allow a user to have multiple emails?

Question

I'm looking for a solution to allow a user on my app to have more than 1 email. This should work similar to Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora. Where an account can have multiple emails, 1 as the primary.

Is there a turn-key solution for devise avaialble? I'm hoping to not have to write this from scratch given it's so common.

Ideas? Thanks

Do you want to enable sign-in with those secondary emails too, for any user? — kiddorails, Apr 29 '13 at 17:50
Yes, a user should only be able to sign in with any of their emails. Also an email should not be able to co-exist, unique emails per accounts across the entire system... Just like how Facebook handles this... — AnApprentice, Apr 29 '13 at 17:51
I'm not aware of an existing solution to this, but if you decide to write it yourself, you might start with this, which is at least similar (multiple possible login values): https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Allow-users-to-sign-in-using-their-username-or-email-address — MrTheWalrus, Apr 29 '13 at 18:05

Bob · Answer 1 · 2013-05-16T07:34:55.713

15

Hm...I'll suggest to create new model, You'll do something like this:

For example model would beUserEmail.

class UserEmail < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :user
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :user_emails
end

and override devise's method to find record in User model:

def self.find_first_by_auth_conditions(warden_conditions)
  conditions = warden_conditions.dup
  if email = conditions.delete(:email)
    User.includes(:user_emails).where('user_emails.email = ?', email).first
  else
    super(warden_conditions)
  end

Read more about override here: https://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wiki/How-To:-Allow-users-to-sign-in-using-their-username-or-email-address

edited May 16 '13 at 07:34

answered Apr 29 '13 at 18:14

Bob

2,081
18
25

This will fail (in a potentially insecure way) for other Devise lookups, such as finding a user by their confirmation token or unlock token. See my answer for a fix. – Brad May 15 '13 at 20:42
How do you deal with password recovery? what do I do if i want to let the user choose which email he want the link to be sent to? – Gady May 16 '13 at 14:22
As I know, to reset password user must fill his email in form. And you will deliver message if email exists. – Bob May 16 '13 at 18:13

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered May 15 '13 at 20:40

Bob's answer is close but it has a potentially dangerous bug. The find_first_by_auth_conditions method should look like this:

def self.find_first_by_auth_conditions(warden_conditions)
  conditions = warden_conditions.dup
  if email = conditions.delete(:email)
    User.includes(:user_emails).where('user_emails.email = ?', email).first
  else
    super(warden_conditions)
  end
end

The email check and call to super is important, because Devise also uses this method to look up Users by confirmation_token, unlock_token, and reset_token. Without the else branch, any calls to this method that don't have an email parameter will either fail, or load up a User with a nil email.

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 29 '13 at 18:15

I would suggest you to create a new model SecondaryEmail.
A User can has_many :secondary_emails, and each SecondaryEmail belongs_to :user.

You will have to add the validation of uniqueness for each email in SecondaryEmail, and further, will have to make sure that no new SecondaryEmail is already a primary email of any User.
Provide the interface, so that a User can add his secondary_emails, with those validations.

Next step will be overriding the SessionController of Devise.
Upon any login procedure, set up your login procedure for SecondaryEmail.where(:email => params[:email]) whenever an email is not found in User's primary emails. If it exists, authenticate with that user's password, else, user doesn't exist.

This is what I came up with so far. I would really love to know the experts' view and approach in this. :)

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 13 '14 at 18:42

I came across this problem awhile ago - and have outlined the solution in my blog .

The steps are summarized below:

Email information has to be stored in a additional model, say Email. So a User has many related Email instances.
We would most likely want to designate one email as the default email which we can use for communication with the user.
The class method of the User class find_first_by_auth_conditions is used to find the user for provided credentials - so we will have to override that method to search using the Email model.
We will have to change the default views because they implicitly assume the presence of email method of user. Rather than rewriting the views entirely we can use add a proxy accessor for email that delegates to the default email for the user.
If a user is allowed to have multiple emails - we would also like to provide the user facility to add/remove emails in the account edit page.
If you need omniauth integration - then the stock implementation of User.from_omniauth outlined in the devise wiki will have to be modified to support multiple emails.

My implementation is available on Github.

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered May 10 '13 at 08:39

The answers given here is pretty good, and should solve your problem. To answer your last question, i don't think you will find a gem for this, as it's too simple even though it's pretty common. Just make it from scratch as suggested, it should not be to much work :)

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 24 '14 at 18:46

Bob's answer threw a SQL error for me in rails 4.1.5- the below change got it working, per http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_querying.html#specifying-conditions-on-eager-loaded-associations:

def self.find_first_by_auth_conditions(warden_conditions)
  conditions = warden_conditions.dup
  if email = conditions.delete(:email)
    User.includes(:user_emails).where(user_emails: {email: email}).first
  else
    super(warden_conditions)
  end
end

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 04 '16 at 11:06

You can use the devise-multi_email gem: https://github.com/allenwq/devise-multi_email

Replace devise :authenticatable with devise :multi_email_authenticatable, so that your models might look like:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :emails

  # Replace :database_authenticatable, with :multi_email_authenticatable
  devise :multi_email_authenticatable, :registerable
end

class Email < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
end

And if you want all the emails to be confirmable and recover your password from anyone of your emails, just

devise :multi_email_authenticatable, :multi_email_confirmable, :confirmable

Is there a solution for Rails Gem Devise to allow a user to have multiple emails?

7 Answers7

Linked