/bodyguards

Flexible permission management

Primary LanguageRuby

bodyguards

bodyguards provides a small DSL to create classes to manage the feature permissions in your project.

Documentation

You create bodyguard classes by inheriting from Bodyguards::Base and registering rules for your feature names.

Bodyguards::Base methods

  • #permit_to(feature_name, &block)
    • Register a rule for the given feature name
    • The block is evaluated in the scope of the given subject
    • The result of the block evaluation is returned by #permission_to?/#rejection_to?
  • #permit_all(&block)
    • Register a global rule that is evaluated before any feature-specific rule by #permission_to?/#rejection_to? and stops any further evaluation on success
  • #permission_to?(feature_name, subject)
    • Evaluates the rule block registered for the given feature name in the scope of the given subject and returns the result
  • #rejection_to?(feature_name, subject)
    • Complement to #permission_to?
  • #any_permission?(subject)
    • Returns the result of the first rule block evaluation with a truthy return value

You can create as many bodyguard classes as you want, e.g. corresponding to the available contexts of your project.

Example rails application

app/models/user.rb

  class User
    def admin?
      [...]
    end

    def super_cool?
      id == 1
    end
  end

app/bodyguards/application_bodyguard.rb

  class AdminBodyguard < Bodyguards::Base
    permit_to :show_dashboard { admin? }
    permit_to :delete_users { admin? }

    permit_all { super_cool? }
  end

app/controllers/admin_controller.rb

  class AdminController
    def index
      render template: 'public/system/403.html' unless AdminBodyguard.permission_to?(:show_dashboard, current_user)
    end
  end

app/layouts/application.html.erb

  [...]
  <%= link_to '/admin' if AdminBodyguard.any_permission?(current_user) %>
  [...]

Things to do

  • Add some rails-specific helpers, e.g. to auto-check permissions in controllers based on naming conventions
  • Maybe put the rails-specific things into an extra gem 'bodyguards-rails'