⚠️ This library is no longer being maintained by the original contributor so I have taken it upon myself to rename the gem and publish it on rubygems.org. You can follow that project here. Feel free to notify me of any issues that arise as I will be maintaining and supporting it.

Easy Roles

Simple rails gem for basic role authorization with ruby on rails.

Changelog

Please read the CHANGELOG.md file.

Install

⚠️ I have been maintaining this gem for over a year now and have not had any of my pull requests approved and the original owner has not gotten back to me about transfering ownership. What this means is that I'll eventually need to host this gem at rubygems.org under a different gem name. To use this gem with your Rails application, instead of installing it from the rubygems.org repository, add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'easy_roles', git: 'https://github.com/aarona/easy_roles.git'

Basic Setup

Serialize Method

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'easy_roles', git: 'https://github.com/aarona/easy_roles.git'

Then generate the migration:

rails g easy_roles user roles

Or add a roles column to your users model, and set the default value to --- []. Please note you can call this column anything you like, I like to use the name "roles".

t.string :roles, default: "--- []"

Then you need to add easy_roles :column_name to your model:

  class User < ActiveRecord::Base
    easy_roles :roles
  end

Bitmask Method

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'easy_roles', git: 'https://github.com/aarona/easy_roles.git'

Then generate the migration:

rails g easy_roles user roles --use-bitmask-method

Or add a roles_mask column to your users model of type integer, and set the default value to 0. Please note you can call this column anything you like, I like to use the name "roles_mask":

t.integer :roles_mask, default: 0

Add easy_roles :column_name, method: :bitmask to your model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  easy_roles :roles_mask, method: :bitmask
end

And lastly you need to add a constant variable which stores an array of the different roles for your system. The name of the constant must be the name of your column in full caps.

WARNING: Bitmask storage relies that you DO NOT change the order of your array of roles, if you need to add a new role, just append it to the end of the array.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  easy_roles :roles_mask, method: :bitmask
  
  # Constant variable storing roles in the system
  ROLES_MASK = %w[admin moderator user].freeze
end

Usage

Easy roles extends your model, and adds a few methods needed for basic role authorization.

adding a role to a user

add_role 'role'

adding multiple roles at the same time to a user

add_roles 'admin', 'manager'

removing a role from a user

remove_role 'role'

check to see if a user has a certain role

has_role? 'role'
# or
is_role? # role being anything you like, for example 'is_admin?' or 'is_awesome?'

For every method above there is a bang method too.

  add_role! 'role'
  add_roles! 'admin', 'manager'
  remove_role! 'role'

Examples

@user = User.first

@user.add_role 'admin'

@user.is_admin?
=> true

@user.has_role? 'admin'
=> true

@user.is_awesome?
=> false

@user.add_role 'awesome'

@user.is_awesome?
=> true

@user.remove_role 'admin'

@user.is_admin?
=> false

etc etc

Protecting controllers

There are many ways to implement views for specific roles, so I did not specifically supply one. Here's an example on what you could do:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def admin_required
    unless current_user && current_user.is_admin?
      flash[:error] = "Sorry, you don't have access to that."
        redirect_to root_url and return false
    end
  end
end

Then in your AdminsController or any controller that you only want admins to view:

class AdminsController < ApplicationController
   before_filter :admin_required
end

class MarksController < ApplicationController
   before_filter :admin_required, only: %w(create update)
end

Scopes

By default, easy_roles adds the with_role scope to your models.

  @admins = User.with_role('admin')

If you're using the bitmask method, an ArgumentError will be thrown if an undeclared scope is queried. Since an ActiveRecord::Relation is returned, the query is chainable:

  BitmaskUser.with_role('admin').where(active: true).to_sql
  # => SELECT "bitmask_users".* FROM "bitmask_users" WHERE "bitmask_users"."roles_mask" IN (1, 3, 5, 7) AND "bitmask_users"."active" = 't'
  
  SerializeUser.with_role('admin').where(active: true).to_sql
  # => SELECT "serialize_users".* FROM "serialize_users" WHERE "serialize_users"."active" = 't' AND (serialize_users.roles LIKE "%!admin!%")

easy_roles also supports a without_role scope.

@non_admins = User.without_role('admin')

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/_aaron0

License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.