Ruby on Rails project question

Hey Maxine,

The "!" at the end of "authenticate_user!" is just a naming convention in Ruby. The exclamation point usually denotes that a method is "dangerous" in one way or another. For example, calling the "reverse!" method on a string will modify the original variable while the "reverse" method will return a new string with the characters reversed.

In order to change the redirect to the new_user_session_path when not signed, I think you'd have to write your own custom method instead of "authenticate_user!" in order to do so. You could also rewrite "authenticate_user!" in your controllers. Devise does let you customize the redirected route after a user is signed in, but not before (check out https://github.com/plataformatec/devise for more info -- search for "after_sign_in_path"). You could just write another method in your controller:

def authenticate_user!
  if user_signed_in?
    return true
  else
    flash[:warn] = "You must be signed in to access that page."
    redirect_to root_path
  end
end

Thanks Jason!