Use Devise Session to Authenticate Doorkeeper API for Rails/Ember app

Question

I'm developing a Rails app along with a corresponding API and contemplating introducing Ember for some particularly dynamic front end components. I'm using Devise for authentication and Doorkeeper to secure API endpoints and manage OAuth tokens.

I don't want to replace the login piece with Ember so the Ember app will likely be initialized once the user logs in on the primary "logged in index" page. I'd like the Ember app to use the public API rather than rendering JSON from my rails-centric controllers, partly for simplicity and partly to force me to keep the API up to date.

Since the user is already logged in, I don't think it makes sense to do the OAuth dance and get a token. Instead I'd like the API to allow requests from clients that have been logged in by Devise (presence of session / cookie). Effectively, you should be able to visit /api/v1/resources.json in a browser once logged in to the app and receive a JSON response. Currently its a 401 Unauthorized.

Does this seem like a reasonable approach? If so, does anyone have experience doing this?

Answer 1

For anyone interested in this in the future, the answer was pretty straightforward:

module Api
  module V0
    class ApiController < ActionController::Base
      before_action :doorkeeper_authorize!, unless: :user_signed_in?

    end
  end
end

The key part being unless: :user_signed_in? , which is provided by Devise