Setup

In this section, setup of the ACL package is covered. It goes without saying, you should have some prior knowledge about how to work with Laravel's Authorization, before attempting to use this package's components.

• Register Service Provider
• Publish Assets (optional)
  • Publish Assets for Athenaeum Core Application
• Configuration
  • Using your own models
• The HasRoles trait
• Migrate the database
• Define permissions for Gate
  • When acl tables are missing...
• Onward

Register Service Provider

Register AclServiceProvider inside your configs/app.php.

return [

    // ... previous not shown ... //

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Autoloaded Service Providers
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    */

    'providers' => [

        \Aedart\Acl\Providers\AclServiceProvider::class

        // ... remaining services not shown ... //
    ],
];

Publish Assets (optional)

Run vendor:publish to publish this package's configuration.

php artisan vendor:publish

After the command has completed, you should see configs/acl.php in your application.

Publish Assets for Athenaeum Core Application

If you are using the Athenaeum Core Application, then run the following command to publish assets:

php {your-cli-app} vendor:publish-all

Configuration

Inside the configs/acl.php file, you can change configuration for this package.

Using your own models

By default, this package's Eloquent models are used when interacting the various ACL components. To this this, simply state the class paths of your own models, in the models setting.

Note

If you choose to use your own models, then please make sure that they extend this package's Eloquent models - otherwise you will experience unexpected behavior.

<?php

return [

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Models
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    */

    'models' => [

        'user' => \App\Models\User::class,

        'role' => \App\Models\Acl\Role::class,

        'permission' => \App\Models\Acl\Permission::class,

        'group' => \App\Models\Acl\Permissions\Group::class
    ],

    // ... remaining not shown
];

The HasRoles trait

Your Eloquent User model must make use of the HasRoles trait. This will ensure that users can be assigned roles and thereby be granted permissions.

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Aedart\Acl\Traits\HasRoles;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use HasRoles;
}

Migrate the database

Once you have configured the ACL components to your liking, you must migrate the database, so that the various tables can be installed.

php artisan migrate

Note

The current version of this package does not publish it's database migration files. They are loaded directly via AclServiceProvider, when the artisan migrate command is executed.

Define permissions for Gate

To ensure that Laravel's Authorisation Gate component is able to distinguish between which permission a user is granted or not, you must define these in your application's \App\Providers\AuthServiceProvider class. This can easily be accomplished via the ACL Registrar component's define() method.

<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use Aedart\Acl\Traits\RegistrarTrait;
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Access\Gate;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Support\Providers\AuthServiceProvider as ServiceProvider;

class AuthServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    use RegistrarTrait;

    // ... previous not shown ...

    public function boot(Gate $gate)
    {
        $this->registerPolicies();
        
        $this->getRegistrar()->define($gate);
    }
}

When acl tables are missing...

CI environment

If you have a CI environment, you might experience a "missing permissions table" failure, when installing a fresh instance of the application. This will happen when the AuthServiceProvider's boot() is invoked, before migrations are installed.

A possible solution for this, is to safely ignore the QueryException. E.g.:

use Aedart\Utils\Str;
use Illuminate\Database\QueryException;

try {
    $this->getRegistrar()->define($gate);
} catch(QueryException $e) {
    // Ignore exception - BUT ONLY IF it concerns missing permissions table!
    // Otherwise, re-throw the exception...
    if (!Str::contains($e->getMessage(), [
        'could not find driver (SQL: select * from `permissions`)',
        'relation "permissions" does not exist'
    ])) {
        throw $e;
    }
}

This issue can be very frustrating. Yet, this package dares not assume how to deal missing with migrations or boot order of your service providers.

Onward

You should now be ready to start working with the ACL components. In the upcoming sections, how to create permissions, roles, granting & revoking permissions ...etc, is covered in details.