ruby on rails - Whitelisting with devise

Question

I am using devise to manage user authentication in my rails app. Devise is really great for that.

However I have a special requirement for my application: A user must be whitelisted before he can register as a User.

So there is a admin which creates a list of allowed emails. A user registers with a email and if the email is in the whitelist table he will be registered. If however, the mail is not in the whitelist, the registration should be aborted with a message like "You are not yet invited".

Do you have an idea how that could be solved with devise?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would just use model validation. I'm assuming your User class has the devise method

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable #etc

  before_validation :whitelisted

  def whitelisted
    unless celebrityemail.include? email
      errors.add :email, "#{email} is not on our invitation list"  
    end
  end 

end