I need to have a custom mechanism for signing in using Devise with Rails 4. So I found the `sign_in` method in [Devise's test helpers section of their documentation](https://github.com/plataformatec/devise#test-helpers):

```
sign_in @user          # sign_in(resource)

```

But is that the proper way to sign someone in from the web? In particular, will it do all the things Devise does when a user signs in, like recording the date/time stamps, IP addresses, sign in counts, etc? Or is this just for testing purposes?