Question

My Rails 3 app is using Devise and I noticed that my users table was missing it’s authentication_token column. Not sure how it’s been authenticating users up until now, but in either case I’m looking to add the authentication_token column to repeat what was done in this tutorial: http://ariejan.net/2011/03/27/rails-3-devise-uploadify-no-flash-session-hacks. How do I go about adding this in?

Edit

I did notice that in my config/initializers/devise.rb I had this, which I take is an alternative to auth tokens?

# If true, uses the password salt as remember token. This should be turned
# to false if you are not using database authenticatable.
  config.use_salt_as_remember_token = true

Edit 2

I also tried adding the following to my Users model but nothing changed.

devise :database_authenticatable

Here is my current user model:

devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
       :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable

Answer 1

Token authentication is only used for API style authentication where you receive a JSON response from another application. By default Devise uses email and password authentication, which is what the :database_authenticatable is configuring.

In order to set your app up this way you can follow either tutorial from the Devise Wiki. Either one of them will point you in the right direction.