Question

I would like to allow anonymous access to my forums. I am using the Forem Gem and the Devise Gem. I have a before_filter in my ApplicationController that ensures users are logged in.

before_filter :authenticate_user!

In my own controllers I use skip_filter to allow anonymous access to actions but I do not know how to do this for the controllers in the Forem Gem.

I could move the before_filter statement from my ApplicationController into each of my own Controllers but I would rather not.

Answer 1

The best place for this would be a file inside your app/controllers directory at forem/application_controller-decorator.rb that contains this content:

Forem::ApplicationController.class_eval do
  skip_before_filter :authenticate_member!
end

You would then need to include this file using lines like this in a file called config/initiailizers/load_decorators.rb:

Dir.glob(Rails.root.join("app/**/*_decorator*.rb")) do |c|
  Rails.configuration.cache_classes ? require(c) : load(c)
end

This would allow you to specify other decorators as well, for any other class of Forem, if you so desired.

I stole this idea from Spree (which I work on full-time now), and I think it’s pretty solid. You can see the original implementation of it here.