Rails 5.2 ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken

Question

After upgrading to Rails 5.2 I started to get an ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken error for all forms in my application. I have worked around this by disabling Turbolinks for all forms, which works but is not a very good solution.

Seaarching the internet, the common solution recommended seems to be to disable protect_from_forgery

skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token, raise: false

• https://github.com/ForestAdmin/forest-rails/pull/254
• Rails 5.2 some controller actions gives InvalidAuthenticityToken
• https://github.com/nsarno/knock/issues/208
• https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/ec4a836919c021c0a5cf9ebeebb4db5e02104a55

Why would we need to disable protect_from_forgery , and doesn't that create a security hole ?

EDIT

csrf_meta_tags are in the layout.

Answer 1

For Rails 5.2 default_protect_from_forgery is enable by default on ActionController::Base .

You can disable it using the following syntax as explained in the PR .

config.action_controller.default_protect_from_forgery = false

Ref from the docs :

config.action_controller.default_protect_from_forgery determines whether forgery protection is added on ActionController:Base. This is false by default, but enabled when loading defaults for Rails 5.2.

Answer 2

For rails 5.2 I had to add these to lines inside controller I had a issue:

  skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token, raise: false
  skip_after_action :verify_authorized

and it worked in my case.