Grantinee

Grantinee is a library to manage your database permissions. It supports MySQL and Postgres, allowing for granular per-table, and per-column permission setting. Tight and explicit permissions, instead of "allow all access" approach, may enhance the data security in your app, and make the GDPR compliance easier for multi-user databases (like when you have a service-oriented architecture).

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'grantinee'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install grantinee

Before you start using Grantinee you need to configure it.

As long as you use Grantinee's executable, everything is plug-and-play. Just make sure that you operate in the right environment, and your database user has granting rights (most likely it won't have them for security reasons). Simply run:

$ RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec grantinee

If you'd like to use Grantinee programmatically as a library, you will need to create two things:

# Create or pass an existing logger
Grantinee.logger = ::Logger.new(STDOUT)

# (optional) Manually call ActiveRecord detection
Grantinee::Engine.detect_active_record_connection!

You may create an initializer, providing each information separately:

Grantinee.configure do |c|
  c.engine   = :mysql

  c.username = 'root'
  c.password = 'password'
  c.hostname = 'localhost'
  c.port     = 3306
  c.database = 'database_name'
end

Alternatively you can use the database URL (looking at you Heroku):

Grantinee.configure do |c|
  c.engine = :mysql
  c.url    = "mysql://root:password@localhost:3306/database_name"
end

In case you do not want to or cannot use an initializer, you can save your configuration in a standalone ruby file, which you pass as an argument in the command line, i.e.:

$ grantinee -c ./config/grantinee.yml

Grantinee provides flexible configuration options through the command line parameters, you can easily review them, by running:

$ grantinee --help

Usage: grantinee [options]
    -h, --help                       Displays help
    -v, --verbosity=LEVEL            Set verbosity level to debug, info, warn, error, fatal, or unknown (default: warning)
    -r, --require=FILE               Application boot file path (default: ./config/environment.rb)
    -f, --file=FILE                  Permission definitions file path (default: ./Grantinee)
    -c, --config=FILE                Database configuration file path

You can use the DSL to quickly set up your permissions:

on "database_name" do
  # User on any host
  user :username do
    select :users, [ :id, :name ]
    insert :users, [ :tracking_id ]
    update :users, [ :tracking_id ]

    all :articles
  end

  # Or user on a specific host
  user 'username@example.org' do
    select :users, [ :id, :name ]
    insert :users, [ :tracking_id ]
  end
end

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/blinkist/grantinee. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Grantinee project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.