acl9

acl9

Acl9 is a role-based authorization system that provides a concise DSL for securing your Rails application.

Access control is pointless if you're not sure you've done it right. The fundamental goal of acl9 is to ensure that your rules are easy to understand and easy to test - in other words acl9 makes it easy to ensure you've got your permissions correct.

Installation

Acl9 is Semantically Versioned, so just add this to your Gemfile (note that you need 3.2 for Rails 6+ support):

gem 'acl9', '~> 3.2'

We're only testing with Ruby >= 3.1 so YMMV for less than that

Rails 4 - stick with 2.x

gem 'acl9', '~> 2.0'

Rails 0.12'

## Getting Started

The simplest way to demonstrate this is with some examples.

### Access Control

You declare the access control directly in your controller, so it's visible and
obvious for any developer looking at the controller:

```ruby
class Admin::SchoolsController  School
    allow :admins, :managers, :teachers, :of => :school
    deny :teachers, :only => :destroy

    action :index do
      allow anonymous, logged_in
    end

    allow logged_in, :only => :show
    deny :students
  end

  def index
    # ...
  end

  # ...
end

You can see more about all this stuff in the wiki under Access Control Subsystem

Roles

The other side of acl9 is where you give and remove roles to and from a user. As you're looking through these examples refer back to the Access Control example and you should be able to see which access control rule each role corresponds to.

Let's say we want to create an admin of a given school, not a global admin, just the admin for a particular school:

user.has_role! :admin, school
user.has_role! :admin, of: school

Then let's say we have some support people in our organization who are dedicated to supporting all the schools. We could do two things, either we could come up with a new role name like :school_support or we can use the fact that we can assign roles to any object, including a class, and do this:

user.has_role! :support, School
user.has_role! :support, for: School

You can see the allow line in our access_control block that this corresponds with. If we had used :school_support instead then that line would have to be: allow :school_support

Now, when a support person leaves that team, we need to remove that role:

user.has_no_role! :support, School
user.has_no_role! :support, at: School

…

sh
bin/rails g acl9:setup -h

…

ruby
user.has_role! :admin, school

…

ruby
# config/initializers/acl9.rb
Acl9.config.default_association_name = :roles

# or...
Acl9.configure do |c|
  c.default_association_name = :roles
end

Reset Defaults

On the off chance that you ever need to reset the config back to its default you can use:

Acl9.config.reset!

Upgrade Notes

Acl9 now protects global roles by default

Please, PLEASE, PLEASE note. If you're upgrading from the 0.x series of acl9 then there's an important change in one of the defaults for 1.x. We flipped the default value of :protect_global_roles from false to true.

Say you had a role on an object:

user.has_role! :manager, department

We all know that this means:

user.has_role? :manager, department    # => true
user.has_role? :manager, in: department    # => true

With :protect_global_roles set to false, as it was in 0.x then the above role would mean that the global :manager role would also be true.

Ie. this is how 0.x behaved:

user.has_role? :manager      # => true

Now in 1.x we default :protect_global_roles to true which means that the global :manager role is protected, ie:

user.has_role? :manager      # => false

In words, in 1.x just because you're the :manager of a department that doesn't make you a global :manager (anymore).

Acl9 now normalizes role names by default

So basically we downcase, underscore, and singularize your role names, so:

user.has_role! 'FooBars'

user.has_role? 'FooBars'     # => true
user.has_role? :foo_bar      # => true

user.has_role! :foo_bar      # => nil, because it was already set above

If you're upgrading then you will want to do something like this:

Role.all.each do |role|
  role.update! name: role.name.underscore.singularize
end

Then check for any duplicates and resolve those manually.

Acl9 now raises ArgumentError on bad args to allow/deny

In 2.x and above we now try to help the developer by raising ArgumentError if they mess up with the options they pass to allow/deny, this prevents people doing things that they think are going to work but actually aren't like:

  allow all, actions: [ :index, :show ]    # <---- BROKEN!!

Community

Gitter: Join the gitter chat here

docs: Rdocs are available here.

StackOverflow: Go ask (or answer) a question on StackOverflow

Mailing list: We have an old skule mailing list as well acl9-discuss group

Contributing: Last but not least, check out the Contributing Guide if you want to get even more involved

Acknowledgements

All these people are awesome! as are all the people who have raised or investigated issues.