Rails 4 how to: User sign up with email confirmation in five minutes, using Devise and Mailcatcher

Sometimes you might find yourself wanting to quickly prototype an application that requires user sign ups. Here’s a quick guide to setting up a new rails application with user signup and email confirmation.

Example project available here: https://github.com/rhardih/rails4-with-user-signup. Each step below will be annotated with a commit linked on Github.

Set up a new rails project

1. rails new rails4-with-user-signup -d postgresql
2. cd rails4-with-user-signup
3. bin/rake db:create
4. bin/rails s

If you’re on OS X using PostgreSQL, you might see this error intially:

could not connect to server: No such file or directory Is the server running locally and accepting connections on Unix domain socket “/var/pgsql_socket/.s.PGSQL.5432”?

One extra step adjusting the config/database.yml is needed. Just uncomment the host option and you should be good to go. If you go to http://localhost:3000, you should see the familiar “Welcome aboard, You’re riding Ruby on Rails!” message page.

Commits d991a6, b8d2f4.

Add Devise for user sign up and authentication

1. Follow the Getting Started section of the Devise README. Commits be1c60, be34ad, 3625cd.
2. Then follow the the Devise wiki page for adding :confirmable to Users. Commits eedaab, 862a3e, 2733d8, 4ee44b.
3. Additonally, to make sure you can actually send email in development mode, add the following options to config/environments/development.rb:
   config.action_mailer.default_url_options = { host: ‘localhost’, port: 3000 }
   config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
   config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {:address => “localhost”, :port => 1025} 

   Commit: 35e177.

Setup and run Mailcatcher to capture Devise sign up emails

1. Install: gem install mailcatcher
2. Run: mailcatcher

Test run

Open another tab at http://localhost:1080, where you can see the mailcatcher interface with an empty mail queue.

Now go to http://localhost:3000/users/sign_up and create a new user.

Check again in the mailcatcher interface. You should now see an email with the subject “Confirmation instructions”.

Congratulations! You’ve just set up a a new rails application with user sign up, authentication and email confirmation.