Devise, Omniauth and Omniauthable

So anyone who has wanted to integrate Devise and Omniauth recently has probably come across the recent Railscasts on the topic, here and here. However this was for Devise prior to 1.2 at which point the Devise guys introduced the :omniauthable method.

The problem, as highlighted by this stackoverflow question is that it is quite hard to come across a good example of Devise’s omniauthable set up with multiple providers. After much searching, the closest I could find was here. (There is another example here. It didn’t specifically include multiple providers but the structure seemed to allow for it more so than the example on the Devise wiki.) 

So my next gripe with what I had found to this point was that it didn’t handle the case of twitter authentication very well. Since twitter doesn’t return an email, the ‘Railscasts’ approach was to ask for an email upon signing up. This seemed too high friction for me and I wanted something that allowed users to register via twitter without having to provide any extra information.

So I was just in the process of trying to meld all of this together into my own solution for this post, when ‘one more Google search’ (after many) yielded a wonderful gist here. This finally seems to answer most of my issues in a sane manner. I am about to give this a try now…. fingers crossed……