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Laravel Authorize

This module makes managing user access to different parts of Laravel applications easier. You can protect your routes with authorize middleware based on user roles or user permissions without adding any extra code to your controller to keep them as clean as no authorization were used at all.

Supported versions

To install in Laravel 5.4+ use this branch, however to install in Laravel >= 5.1 and Laravel < 5.4 please refer to version 1.1.

Installation

1. Run

   in console to install this module

2. Open config/app.php and:

   • Comment line with

   • Add

     in same section (providers)

3. Run

   in your console to publish default configuration files, middleware, base policy class and unauthorized view

4. In app/Http/Kernel.php in $routeMiddleware add:

   to register Authorize middleware

5. Open App\Http\Middleware\Authorize.php and adjust errorResponse and reportUnauthorizedAttempt to your needs. In case defaults are fine to you, open resources/views/errors/401.blade.php and adjust this template to your needs - by default this view will be used if user has no permissions to given route.

6. Open your User.php model file and add

   before class definition and make User class implement this interface, so it should look like this

   As ... you should leave all default interfaces this class User implements.

7. Make sure your User class implements Roleable Contract. In order to do that, you need to implement 2 methods: hasRole and getRoles. To simplify this, you can use default Roleable Trait. Just put inside your User class:

   Be aware this trait assumes you have role property for User model (what is equal that you have role column in your users table in database that hold your role name). In many cases it won't be true, so you need to override at least getRoles method to get valid user roles. Assuming you have one to many role relationship (user is only assigned to single role), custom implementation could look like this:

   Of course, if user can be assigned in your system to multiple roles or your database structure looks different, you should adjust this method code to match your application logic.

Getting started

This module allows you to protect your routes with authorize middleware. You have 2 ways to use this middleware (you can use both in same application) - either based on roles or based on permissions.

Using this module you can set permissions both for authorized and not-authorized users to keep authorization layer consistent.

1. Role based authorization

You can specify middleware with arguments for example authorize:manager,employee - in this case only user role will be verified. In this example if user has any role manager or employee they will be allowed to access route, otherwise they won't be allowed to do that. However in above example also users with super_roles will be allowed to do this (super_roles in config/authorize.php). So if you define in super_roles also admin, also users with admin role will be allowed to access this route so you don't need to specify admin role in case you specify other roles (but of course you can do this if you want).

Nothing more needs to be configured to use this mode.

2. Permission based authorization

In this option, you cannot use closures in routes protected by authorize middleware. Make sure you don't use them in those routes or you'll get exception when applying authorize middleware

If you use middleware without any arguments for example authorize, it will take advantage of Laravel authorization with some extra changes to this mechanism. By default Laravel suggests creating policies for Models but it might be more reasonable in some cases to use policies for controllers and that's what this module does.

Configuration

Open config/authorize.php and in super_roles put roles name for which you allow everything so no extra checks will be made. In most cases it's reasonable to put here admin role but in some cases you might want to leave this empty if you want to run mode detailed rules. Put all roles you use in your application into roles section of permissions section.

Protecting your controllers

Let's assume we have controller UserController with default REST actions - index, show, create, store, edit, update, destroy and we would like to to protect this controller with authorize middleware because we don't want all users to allow all actions from this controller.

First, we need to open app\Providers\AuthServiceProvider.php and add policy mapping for our controller in $policies property:

Now, let's create Policy class in app/Policies/UserControllerPolicy.php file with the following definition

Now, you need to open config/authorize.php and in section available in permissions you will add permissions you need to use in order to protect each controller method. By default permissions are in format $group . controller method. We defined in UserControllerPolicy group as user and in our controller we have the following methods: index, show, create, store, edit, update, destroy, so our permissions should by default look like this:

But in fact in most cases you don't need permission for create at all. User should be able to run create method of controller only if they have permission to run store method. Same would apply to edit - they should be able to run edit only if they have permission to run update (this behaviour can be modified - see Customization), so let's add into those section only below permissions:

Now, it's time to set those permissions for different roles. In section roles in permissions you have some example roles. You should put here roles that match your system roles names and assign to them any of those permissions. For admin user usually you want to allow everything, so you can add only * as permission and it means, that role admin will have all permissions defined in available section.

Now make sure, you apply authorize middleware to UserController in your routes.php for example this way:

and that's it! You've protected your first controller with authorize middleware.

If you want to protect another controller, just repeat those steps. You need to of course make sure you set $group property in your new policy class to unique value.

Advanced usage

By default as previously showed, you can create very simple policy class for your controller and that's it. However in real application, you might want to use more complex rules in order to verify if user has or not access to given controller method. For example user might have permission to update user, but they are allowed to update only his own account.

Default flow for authorization verification looks like this:

• if user is not logged it will be applied for him role set as value for guest_role_name (by default anonymous)
• if user has super role (you can configure them in super_roles section in config/authorize.php) it will have permission for anything and no custom methods will be run
• if user does not have necessary permission, no further checks will be made
• if user has necessary permission, we verify if there are custom method in Policy for ability (the method name should match the method name from controller). If there's not, user will be allowed to run this action
• however if there is custom method in Policy for ability, whether user can run this action or not will depend on result of custom method for this ability.

Let's assume we have route like this:

and we would like to allow displaying all users only for admin role, and for others we would like to to allow displaying only their own account.

we could have registered in RouteServiceProvider.php the following route model binding:

So, now in our UserControllerPolicy class we could create the following method:

And now this extra method will be used after verification if user has user.show permission. Because in above case we assume we have admin role in super_roles that's it what we need to use here.

Of course, in addition, you could use here also $type parameter or also request parameters (in case they should affect authorization) using getRequest() method or using property $request directly.

Be aware that in above example we assume $user is User object. However in case we allow this route also for unauthorized user, we should modify the code to handle also such situation. Let's assume we would like to allow unauthorized user access to see any user and for authorized only their own profile. In such case, we should alter code of the method like so:

Customization

By default, all create and edit abilities will be automatically replaced by store and update because in most cases this will be desired behaviour. However, if you don't want to use it this way or you want to create custom ability mappings, just open app/Policies/BasePolicyController class and create custom getAbilityMappings method. Of course you could do it also in single Policy class for example UserControllerPolicy if you want to.

Also in some cases it could happen that for methods in 2 different controller you would like to use same permission. Then you could in one of your Policy classes, create custom getPermissionMappings method, for example:

and this way you could use permission not base on group assigned to current Policy class.

Advanced customization

This module uses default implementation for the following interfaces:

• Mnabialek\LaravelAuthorize\Contracts\Permissionable
• Mnabialek\LaravelAuthorize\Contracts\PermissionHandler

But in some cases you might want to override default implementation or create custom one. For example you might want to use custom database handler to store permissions in database.

So if you want create custom implementation, just implement any of those 2 interfaces and in config/authorize.php in bindings section set your custom bindings for those interfaces.

Licence

This package is licenced under the MIT license