Easy Roles¶ ↑

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

Please read the CHANGELOG.rdoc file.

gem install easy_roles

or it can be installed as a rails plugin.

script/plugin install git://github.com/platform45/easy_roles.git

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'easy_roles'

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

Add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'easy_roles'

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.

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

  # Constant variable storing roles in the system
  ROLES_MASK = %w[admin moderator user]
end

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

adding a role to a user

add_role 'role'

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'
remove_role! 'role'

@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

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

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!%")

Follow me on twitter: twitter.com/ryan_za

Email: ryan at platform45.com

Copyright © 2011 Platform45

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