401 Auth Error when using devise with Rails and setting authentication_keys to [:username]

Question

Hi I'm having an error similar to a few on here but I think the root cause is different, as no solution I've found has worked. Basically I'm using Devise in Rails on a small project, and although using the sign_up page works just fine (the user is placed into the DB), the sign_in page seems to find the user but not set them as the current user. The only thing I've changed from the out-of-the-box solution is using :username as the auth key not :email.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery prepend: true

  skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token
  before_action :configure_permitted_parameters, if: :devise_controller?

  protected

  def configure_permitted_parameters
    devise_parameter_sanitizer.permit(:sign_up) { |u| u.permit(:username, :email, :password, :password_confirmation) }
    devise_parameter_sanitizer.permit(:sign_in) { |u| u.permit(:username, :password, :remember_me) }

    devise_parameter_sanitizer.permit(:account_update) { |u| u.permit(:username, :email, :password, :current_password) }
  end
end

in my initializer/devise.rb:

  config.authentication_keys = [:username]
  config.case_insensitive_keys = [:username]
  config.strip_whitespace_keys = [:username]

user model

class User < ApplicationRecord
  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :confirmable, :lockable, :timeoutable, :trackable and :omniauthable

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

  def email_required?
    false
  end

  def email_changed?
    false
  end

  def will_save_change_to_email?
    false
  end
end

and the output of the console is shown below:

Started POST "/users/sign_in" for ::1 at 2020-08-11 17:12:53 +0100
Processing by Devise::SessionsController#create as HTML
  Parameters: {"authenticity_token"=>"EbXx8CI0+FsF1HkNwHqsUW09BJ0HOW2lJDjWmJEc03d0AeaBOWVxNFpupUA+qLKIsiVMZ9kfbmCZidZMZIKoXA==", "user"=>{"username"=>"bob", "password"=>"[FILTERED]", "remember_me"=>"0"}, "commit"=>"Log in"}
  User Load (0.4ms)  SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE "users"."username" = $1 ORDER BY "users"."id" ASC LIMIT $2  [["username", "bob"], ["LIMIT", 1]]
Redirected to http://localhost:3031/
Completed 302 Found in 103ms (ActiveRecord: 0.4ms | Allocations: 3788)


Started GET "/" for ::1 at 2020-08-11 17:12:53 +0100
Processing by BoardsController#index as HTML
Completed 401 Unauthorized in 0ms (ActiveRecord: 0.0ms | Allocations: 248)

And the Boards Controller simply has:

before_action :authenticate_user!

which is redirecting back to sign_in because auth is failing.

Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

Putting this here in case anyone else encounters this issue.

If you are using Stimulus Reflex, it currently disables the rails cookie_store and uses cache_store instead. You can either switch back:

config.session_store :cache_store

back to rails default

config.session_store :cookie_store

or run rails dev:cache to enable the cache_store in your development environment.