How To: Change the default sign_in and sign_out routes

When you are using only one role with Devise you may want to change the sign in and sign out routes to /login and /logout (instead of /users/sign_in and /users/sign_out).

This does not work by default because Devise inspects the URL to find which scope you are accessing. So when it sees /users/login, it knows the scope is user, however, when you access /login, Devise cannot know which scope it should use. Luckily, Devise provides a mechanism to specify a default scope, allowing us to have short URLs.

Steps for Rails 3.0.0 forward

All you need to do is to specify in your routes the devise_scope being accessed in that URL:

devise_scope :user do
  get "/login" => "devise/sessions#new"
end

Since devise_scope is aliased to as, this is equivalent:

as :user do
  get "/login" => "devise/sessions#new"
end

Similarly for sign_out:

devise_scope :user do
  delete "/logout" => "devise/sessions#destroy"
end

Note that you can skip all sessions routes and define only your own using the skip option as below:

  devise_for :users, :skip => [:sessions]
  as :user do
    get 'signin' => 'devise/sessions#new', :as => :new_user_session
    post 'signin' => 'devise/sessions#create', :as => :user_session
    delete 'signout' => 'devise/sessions#destroy', :as => :destroy_user_session
  end

This way :authenticate_user! and other helpers will be redirecting the user to the proper custom pages you defined.

Note that if you are making use of the :sign_out_via configuration option, then the signout action above may cause errors. You can duplicate the default behavior (which changes from delete to get based on :sign_out_via) by specifying:

  devise_for :users, :skip => [:sessions]
  as :user do
    get 'signin' => 'devise/sessions#new', :as => :new_user_session
    post 'signin' => 'devise/sessions#create', :as => :user_session
    match 'signout' => 'devise/sessions#destroy', :as => :destroy_user_session,
      :via => Devise.mappings[:user].sign_out_via
  end

Another simple way to do the same thing

The devise_for method has a lot of optional parameters to make things easier. If you just want to remove the users namespace before all the routes and rename sign_in, sign_out to login, logout. Try this way:

devise_for :users, :path => '', :path_names => {:sign_in => 'login', :sign_out => 'logout'}

if you want to use multiple Devise controllers (like passwords) you should still use the first way.