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astro (Laravel 5 Package)

astro is a succinct and flexible way to add Role-based Permissions to Laravel 5.

Contents

• Installation
• Configuration
  • User relation to roles
  • Models
    • Role
    • Permission
    • User
    • Soft Deleting
• Usage
  • Concepts
    • Checking for Roles & Permissions
    • User ability
  • Blade templates
  • Middleware
  • Short syntax route filter
  • Route filter
• Troubleshooting
• License
• Contribution guidelines
• Additional information

Installation

In order to install Laravel 5 astro, just add

"roketin/astro": "5.2.x-dev"

to your composer.json. Then run composer install or composer update.

Then in your config/app.php add

roketin\astro\astroServiceProvider::class

in the providers array and

'astro' => roketin\astro\astroFacade::class

to the aliases array.

If you are going to use Middleware (requires Laravel 5.1 or later) you also need to add

to routeMiddleware array in app/Http/Kernel.php.

Configuration

Set the property values in the config/auth.php. These values will be used by astro to refer to the correct user table and model.

You can also publish the configuration for this package to further customize table names and model namespaces.
Just use php artisan vendor:publish and a astro.php file will be created in your app/config directory.

User relation to roles

Now generate the astro migration:

It will generate the <timestamp>_astro_setup_tables.php migration. You may now run it with the artisan migrate command:

After the migration, four new tables will be present:

• roles — stores role records
• permissions — stores permission records
• role_user — stores many-to-many relations between roles and users
• permission_role — stores many-to-many relations between roles and permissions

Models

Role

Create a Role model inside app/models/Role.php using the following example:

The Role model has three main attributes:

• name — Unique name for the Role, used for looking up role information in the application layer. For example: "admin", "owner", "employee".
• display_name — Human readable name for the Role. Not necessarily unique and optional. For example: "User Administrator", "Project Owner", "Widget Co. Employee".
• description — A more detailed explanation of what the Role does. Also optional.

Both display_name and description are optional; their fields are nullable in the database.

Permission

Create a Permission model inside app/models/Permission.php using the following example:

The Permission model has the same three attributes as the Role:

• name — Unique name for the permission, used for looking up permission information in the application layer. For example: "create-post", "edit-user", "post-payment", "mailing-list-subscribe".
• display_name — Human readable name for the permission. Not necessarily unique and optional. For example "Create Posts", "Edit Users", "Post Payments", "Subscribe to mailing list".
• description — A more detailed explanation of the Permission.

In general, it may be helpful to think of the last two attributes in the form of a sentence: "The permission display_name allows a user to description."

User

Next, use the astroUserTrait trait in your existing User model. For example:

This will enable the relation with Role and add the following methods roles(), hasRole($name), can($permission), and ability($roles, $permissions, $options) within your User model.

Don't forget to dump composer autoload

And you are ready to go.

Soft Deleting

The default migration takes advantage of onDelete('cascade') clauses within the pivot tables to remove relations when a parent record is deleted. If for some reason you cannot use cascading deletes in your database, the astroRole and astroPermission classes, and the HasRole trait include event listeners to manually delete records in relevant pivot tables. In the interest of not accidentally deleting data, the event listeners will not delete pivot data if the model uses soft deleting. However, due to limitations in Laravel's event listeners, there is no way to distinguish between a call to delete() versus a call to forceDelete(). For this reason, before you force delete a model, you must manually delete any of the relationship data (unless your pivot tables uses cascading deletes). For example:

Usage

Concepts

Let's start by creating the following Roles and Permissions:

Next, with both roles created let's assign them to the users. Thanks to the HasRole trait this is as easy as:

Now we just need to add permissions to those Roles:

Checking for Roles & Permissions

Now we can check for roles and permissions simply by doing:

Both hasRole() and can() can receive an array of roles & permissions to check:

By default, if any of the roles or permissions are present for a user then the method will return true. Passing true as a second parameter instructs the method to require all of the items:

You can have as many Roles as you want for each User and vice versa.

The astro class has shortcuts to both can() and hasRole() for the currently logged in user:

You can also use placeholders (wildcards) to check any matching permission by doing:

User ability

More advanced checking can be done using the awesome ability function. It takes in three parameters (roles, permissions, options):

• roles is a set of roles to check.
• permissions is a set of permissions to check.

Either of the roles or permissions variable can be a comma separated string or array:

This will check whether the user has any of the provided roles and permissions. In this case it will return true since the user is an admin and has the create-post permission.

The third parameter is an options array:

• validate_all is a boolean flag to set whether to check all the values for true, or to return true if at least one role or permission is matched.
• return_type specifies whether to return a boolean, array of checked values, or both in an array.

Here is an example output:

The astro class has a shortcut to ability() for the currently logged in user:

Blade templates

Three directives are available for use within your Blade templates. What you give as the directive arguments will be directly passed to the corresponding astro function.

Middleware

You can use a middleware to filter routes and route groups by permission or role

It is possible to use pipe symbol as OR operator:

To emulate AND functionality just use multiple instances of middleware

For more complex situations use ability middleware which accepts 3 parameters: roles, permissions, validate_all

Short syntax route filter

To filter a route by permission or role you can call the following in your app/Http/routes.php:

Both of these methods accept a third parameter. If the third parameter is null then the return of a prohibited access will be App::abort(403), otherwise the third parameter will be returned. So you can use it like:

Furthermore both of these methods accept a fourth parameter. It defaults to true and checks all roles/permissions given. If you set it to false, the function will only fail if all roles/permissions fail for that user. Useful for admin applications where you want to allow access for multiple groups.

Route filter

astro roles/permissions can be used in filters by simply using the can and hasRole methods from within the Facade:

Using a filter to check for a role:

As you can see astro::hasRole() and astro::can() checks if the user is logged in, and then if he or she has the role or permission. If the user is not logged the return will also be false.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter an error when doing the migration that looks like:

Then it's likely that the id column in your user table does not match the user_id column in role_user. Make sure both are INT(10).

When trying to use the astroUserTrait methods, you encounter the error which looks like

Class name must be a valid object or a string

then probably you don't have published astro assets or something went wrong when you did it. First of all check that you have the astro.php file in your app/config directory. If you don't, then try php artisan vendor:publish and, if it does not appear, manually copy the /vendor/roketin/astro/src/config/config.php file in your config directory and rename it astro.php.

License

astro is free software distributed under the terms of the MIT license.

Contribution guidelines

Support follows PSR-1 and PSR-4 PHP coding standards, and semantic versioning.

Please report any issue you find in the issues page.
Pull requests are welcome.