Logging in to WordPress from Rails

I have a rails app (v4.1.6 at the moment) that uses Devise. I have configured a subfolder to serve up WordPress for a blog. That is:

http://my_app.com → rails app

http://my_app.com/blog → wordpress

That is all working great, but I also want the user to be logged in to wordpress when logged into the Rails app.

I did this years ago by having the wordpress server send a request to the rails app using the browser’s cookie. At some point (I forget, maybe Rails 3.1?), Rails got smart enough to figure out that the cookie wasn’t coming from the browser and it invalidated the session.

So, now I’ve got the same business need and am looking for a solution again.

Is there a way to get Rails to not invalidate my session when I reuse the cookie from the server? I’d like to create a new action “/get_current_user” that I can call from wordpress. If I can relax the rails security for just that call, I think I can do the rest.

(There’s a plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/rails-integration-api/ that looks like it would be perfect, except for the part that it is no longer maintained, doesn’t work, and the developer’s website is gone.)