I need more information on how to reproduce this. Devise only replies with HTTP Basic Auth if any authorization header is sent. Maybe someone is injecting those headers improperly?

Btw, these are the authorization headers:

http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/http/request.rb#L213

Maybe nginx or thin are setting them to an empty string? Can you check if doing:

request.authorization.present?

In the following line:

http://github.com/plataformatec/devise/blob/master/lib/devise/failure_app.rb#L66

Fixes the issue?

Hmm, the beta site is currently protected with HTTP Basic Auth by nginx. Perhaps those Authentication headers are being forwarded to the Rails app?

Confirmed, the authorization is still present in the requests.

Perhaps Devise should only respond to Basic Auth for specially named Realms, such as "#{controller_name.singularize} Authentication".

I don't like to scope it to the controller name realm, but checking for the authentication realm is a good idea. What is nginx default realm?

http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpAuthBasicModule

It does not look like it has a default Realm. There has to be a way to infer a Realm from either the Model or the routes?

Good call, I could infer the Realm from the model name. I will do so! :)

Hrm. The Realm is sent by the server and is not required to be sent by the client:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication

Ok, I fixed this. But Nginx would be a more polite citizen if he didn't forward these headers after consuming them. :)

Hmm, still getting Basic Auth challenges for "Application" after re-bundling and restarting the app.

:( I will investigate it more.

Are you sure you cannot change it on nginx side in the meanwhile? You can also turn HTTP Authentication off in your app.

For the time being I could disable the HTTP BasicAuth in Nginx, since I'm protecting everything with Devise.

Yeah, I don't know how to handle this issue besides removing Nginx or Devise HTTP Auth. In Devise there is no way to know where the Authorization headers came from. :(

Alright, I disabled HTTP Basic Auth in Nginx and everything works. Now we know.

Amazing that someone ran into the exact same problem as I :) But I need some sort of protection for the whole site. I guess I will quickly hack some weird global cookie-based authentication before_filter (even though that's not gonna work with the API I'm trying to provide). Anyway, thanks for your quick response @josevalim.

Can I ask for one of you guys to add this to the Wiki? Something with title "Devise and Nginx" telling how to disable Devise's behavior would work great. It would help other people that may find this issue.

Thanks! :)

http://github.com/plataformatec/devise/wikis/devise-and-http-authentication

(I hope that I am not mistaken when I write that HTTP Auth can't be turned off in devise.)

All the best

Hi,

I just had the same problem (and disabling basic auth in devise's config didn't help as it still seemed to respond to the Authorization header). Solved it by adding a custom Rack middleware that removes the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION from the Rack environment:

http://gist.github.com/519273

Breaks devise http basic auth for the whole application, of course.

You can simply disable http_authentication in your config/initializers/devise.rb as well.

Oh yes I did, but it still tried to handle the authorization data... (devise 1.1.rc1, Rails 3 beta4)

Yep, pretty sure I'm seeing the same thing here. Unfortunately the middleware doesn't seem to be solving it for me. Probably doing something stupid; will update this if I get any good info/results. (fwiw rails 3.0.0rc, devise edge from git)

You don't need the middleware. All you need is to disable the http authentication in your config/initializers/devise.rb. Configuring your nginx/apache to not handle http authentication should handle it as well.

It's almost certainly something in my app or server config--I can't replicate locally, and I can't fix remotely :-)
yeah, something with nginx and this box, a non rails app is having same basic auth issues.
final update -- definitely not devise's fault, as usual. Sometimes you get cut playing on the edge....thanks for the great customer service as always Jose.

We are having this issue as well, using Devise 1.1.3 and Rails 3.0.1, we've tried disabling http authentication in the devise config and apache and nothing seems to work. We are only having this issue with IE7 on windows. We also verified that it IS devise causing this to happen because we changed the realm in the config file and it showed the updated realm in the authentication box that pops up. Are there any specific instruction for what/how to fully disable this for apache/devise 1.1.3/Rails 3.0.1?

Could you please do:

puts request.formats

In one of these IE7 requests and paste the output here?

Here you are, sir:

request.formats [*/*]

I hope that is more useful to you :-P

Yes, this is useful to me. :) This is actually a Rails bug, we should not have [/] in formats. Could you please do me another favor? Could you do the following in your controller as well?

puts request.env

Thanks!

Also, could you also check if adding the following line to your config/initializers/devise.rb solves the problem?

config.navigational_formats = [:all, :html]

That does not fix it either. :-/

Thank you for your continued help!

Sorry to ask, but have you restarted the server after doing the change above? If that does not work, I am not sure what will. :(

I restarted the rails app and it didn't work, then I tried restarting apache just to be sure, and that didn't work either. :-/

Please try this one:

config.navigational_formats = [:"/", :html]

still no good :-/

really? :( Last one, what does "puts request.format.inspect" return?

XP IE7:
Processing by SessionsController#current as */*

request.formats: [*/*]
Completed in 0ms

OSX Chrome:
Processing by SessionsController#current as HTML

request.formats: [text/html]
Completed in 0ms

And I did add the .inspect, but it didn't seem to change anything

Yeah. So if setting config.navigational_formats = [:"/", :html] does not fix it, I am not sure of what can fix it.

Could you please try again setting config.navigational_formats and then printing Devise.navigational_formats in a controller to be sure its values are correctly set?

Yeah, it showed up correctly :-/

Just to make sure, you are using which Devise version?

Devise 1.1.3

Seems it's been fixed, one of the guys I work with commented out lines 25 and 26 in failure_app.rb and that seems to have fixed it. It's not pretty, but it works

Hi, Jose
this worked for me:
config.navigational_formats = [:"*/*", :html]

Thanks!
PS: In your comment I couldn't see the "stars", I think they where parsed as markup...

jbarreneche's solution worked for me as well.

+1 to jbarreneche's solution, this fixed HTTP Authentication dialog from being prompted in IE8

config.navigational_formats = [:"*/*", :html]

@tpeden, is it possible you have a custom mime type? Devise decides if http auth is required by checking request.format.to_sym, so if you have something like this:

Mime::Type.register_alias "text/html", :iphone

request.format will be "html", and request.format.to_sym is :iphone, so to prevent http auth you could add this:

config.navigational_formats = [:html, :iphone]