Question

I am implementing Devise and Cancan for user authentication and permissions. Everything works great so far except I am not able to redirect users to the login page when they are not allowed to access a specific feature.

My test is:

feature 'A signed in user' do
  before(:each) do
    user = FactoryGirl.create(:user)
    visit "/login"
    fill_in "user_email", :with => user.email
    fill_in "user_password", :with => "ilovebananas"
    click_button "Sign in"
  end

  scenario 'should not have access to admin dashboard' do
    visit '/admin'
    page.should have_content 'Log in'
  end
end

And I get the following failure:

Failures:
      1) A signed in user should not have access to admin dashboard
         Failure/Error: visit '/admin'
         CanCan::AccessDenied:
         You are not authorized to access this page.

To be clear, all my permission management works as expected so far, except the redirection to login page.

---

Here is how things are set up:

ApplicationController:

check_authorization :unless => :devise_controller? # Cancan

rescue_from CanCan::AccessDenied do |exception|
  redirect_to login_path, alert: exception.message
end

UsersController

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  load_and_authorize_resource         # Cancan
  def queue  
    ...
  end

  ...
end

AdminsController

class AdminController < ActionController::Base
  authorize_resource :class => false # Cancan, used because AdminController doesn't have an associated model
  ...
end

ability.rb

class Ability
  include CanCan::Ability

  def initialize(user)
    user ||= User.new # guest user, not logged in
    can :queue, User

    if user.has_permission? :super_admin
      can :manage, :all
    elsif user.has_permission? :network_admin

    end      
  end
end

What am I missing?

Answer 1

My Admins Controller was not < ApplicationController, so it did not load the ApplicationController rescue_from method.

Making the change solved my issue.