Question

Is it possible to define cancan for anonymous users in devise? Where an anonymous user “can” log in, a logged in user “cannot”.

Can I define cancan abilities for anonymous users, or should I avoid cancan for anonymous users?

Answer 1

I’m not sure i understand the question completely. You can certainly allow anonymous users to do stuff with cancan

#anyone can see this stuff
can :read, [Contact, Question, UserAction, Provider, Organisation]

#only users that are managers can do this
if user.can_manage_data?
  can :manage, [Contact, Organisation, UserAction]
end

But I think you are actually asking ‘can you allow anonymous users to do something that signed in users cannot? That’s not something I’ve done, but i presume that you can use

#noone can see this stuff
cannot :read, [Contact, Question, UserAction, Provider, Organisation]

If the question is specifically about logging in though – i think that is a subtly different problem – a user can read an article (or not), but a user is logged in (or not) and in this specific case I don’t think cancan is the right answer