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Glueful Audit

An event-sourced, append-only audit trail for Glueful apps: it records "actor X did action Y to target Z at time T" as normalized rows, fed automatically from framework and extension domain events, and exposes them through a single filtered, read-only HTTP API.

Audit answers one question: "who did what, to which entity, when?" It is a business/compliance record — distinct from the framework's operational activity_logs (Monolog DB logging). Different shape, retention, immutability, and access control.

Install

Requires glueful/framework >=1.63.0 (for EntityDeletedEvent and the protected BaseRepository::dispatchEvent() seam). The migration creates one table, audit_logs. The extension records nothing until enabled; once enabled, AUDIT_ENABLED is a runtime kill-switch (default on).

Optional: composer require glueful/aegis (>=1.13.0) to record RBAC actions semantically (see RBAC auditing). Audit works fully without it.

How it works

Audit is event-sourced — it never asks controllers to call an audit() helper. A subscriber listens to a curated set of events and writes a normalized row for each:

The actor (the who) isn't carried by entity events, so the subscriber resolves it from the current request's authenticated principal at event time; CLI/system writes record actor = system.

What gets recorded

Each row is one normalized shape:

Indexed for the three queries that matter: the global feed, "everything actor X did," and "the history of this target."

Sources and actions

A delete records that it happened (changes = null, label from the pre-delete record) — never a full snapshot, to limit retention/privacy exposure. Updates carry a redacted before/after diff.

RBAC auditing (optional)

Generic table events would render RBAC as noise — created user_roles. With glueful/aegis installed, audit instead subscribes to Aegis's semantic RBAC events and records readable rows — "actor assigned editor to Jane" — with the role / permission uuid + slug and any resource filter / expiry in context.

• For grants/revokes to a user, the target is the user (so a user's access history is one filter); for role↔permission links, the target is the role.
• Aegis is a soft dependency: if it's absent (or capture.rbac = false), the RBAC subscriber simply isn't registered and audit keeps recording core/auth/entity events. To avoid double-recording, the RBAC assignment pivots (user_roles, user_permissions, role_permissions) are suppressed from generic capture only while the semantic subscriber is active.

Recording your own events

Most app/extension writes don't go through BaseRepository (so they emit no entity event) and aren't auth/RBAC — content publishes, exports, billing, imports. To audit those, make the event self-auditing: implement Glueful\Extensions\Audit\Contracts\AuditableEvent. Any implementer dispatched on the framework event bus is recorded automatically — no subscriber, no reference to the recorder. The audit subscriber fills in the actor and request context (ip / user_agent / request_id / event_id); your event supplies the rest.

AuditableEvent is a tiny contract: auditAction(), auditCategory(), auditTarget(), auditChanges() ({field: {from, to}} for updates), and auditMetadata() (merged into context, redacted by the same redact_fields rules). The AuditableEventDefaults trait supplies no-op defaults so a simple event only defines the first two. The whole group can be turned off with capture.custom = false.

Without the marker interface. If you'd rather not couple an event to this package, depend on the Glueful\Extensions\Audit\Contracts\AuditRecorderInterface service instead and record from your own subscriber:

Read API

Append-only — there are no write/update/delete routes. Both routes require the audit.view permission.

index filters (all optional): actor, action, category, target_type, target_uuid, from, to (ISO timestamps), page, per_page. The response is the framework's flat paginated envelope (data, current_page, per_page, total, total_pages, …), ordered newest-first.

Permissions

The extension declares one permission via the framework's permission catalog:

Configuration (config/audit.php)

Retention

Schedule it from your app's scheduler (the extension ships the command, not the schedule).

Safeguards

• Recursion guard. The recorder writes via a raw Connection insert — never BaseRepository::create() — so an audit write dispatches no event and can't audit itself; the subscriber also hard-skips the audit_logs table.
• Redaction. changes/context are recursively scrubbed of secret-looking fields (password, *_token, …) before the row is written.
• No tokens, ever. Auth handlers build their rows from an explicit field allow-list and never read the session token accessors — no access/refresh token value can reach a row.
• Best-effort. A failed audit write is logged and swallowed; it never breaks the operation being audited.

What it is not

• Not the operational log. activity_logs (Monolog) is for app/security logging; this is a business record.
• Not a write API. It's append-only — rows are produced by events, read by the API, pruned by retention. Nothing edits or deletes individual rows.
• Not an RBAC editor. It records role/permission changes; managing them stays in Aegis.