Admin user administration with Devise

Question

I am trying out Devise for the first time. One of the things that I wanted to do is provide an interface for Admin users to create, find and edit users. Here\'s where I may have

Answer 1

This is how I manage users in one of my apps. I have only one User class generated with

rails g devise User

to which I added a role column with this migration:

class AddRoleToUser < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :users, :role, :string, :default => "client"
  end
end

and my User model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Include default devise modules. Others available are:
  # :token_authenticatable, :confirmable, :lockable and :timeoutable
  devise :database_authenticatable, :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable

  # Setup accessible (or protected) attributes for your model
  attr_accessible :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :remember_me

  def admin?
    self.role == "admin"
  end
end

Then to create new users all you would have to do is provide a custom method in a controller (maybe even subclass Devise::RegistrationsController) like this:

# some_controller.rb
def custom_create_user
  if current_user.admin?
    User.create(:email => params[:email], password => params[:password])
    redirect_to(some_path, :notice => 'sucessfully updated user.')
  else
    redirect_to(some_other_path, :notice => 'You are not authorized to do this.')
  end
end