README

Entrust is a succinct and flexible way to add role-based permissions to Laravel 12|13.

If you are using an older version of laravel, use version ~3.0

ENTRUST (Laravel 12|13 Package)

Installation

Install the package with Composer:

composer require sunergix/entrust-permissions

Laravel package discovery registers the service provider and facade automatically. If your application disables package discovery, add the service provider manually:

Zizaco\Entrust\EntrustServiceProvider::class,

If needed, add the facade alias manually:

'Entrust' => Zizaco\Entrust\EntrustFacade::class,

Run the command below to publish the package config file config/entrust.php:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=entrust-config

Open your config/auth.php and add the following to it:

'providers' => [
    'users' => [
        'driver' => 'eloquent',
        'model' => Namespace\Of\Your\User\Model\User::class,
        'table' => 'users',
    ],
],

If you want to use Middleware, register aliases in your bootstrap middleware configuration:

    'role' => \Zizaco\Entrust\Middleware\EntrustRole::class,
    'permission' => \Zizaco\Entrust\Middleware\EntrustPermission::class,
    'ability' => \Zizaco\Entrust\Middleware\EntrustAbility::class,

For Laravel 12 and 13, register aliases with bootstrap/app.php middleware configuration.

Configuration

Set the property values in the config/auth.php. These values will be used by entrust to refer to the correct user table and model.

To further customize table names and model namespaces, edit the config/entrust.php.

User relation to roles

Now generate the Entrust migration:

php artisan entrust:migration

It will generate the <timestamp>_entrust_setup_tables.php migration. You may now run it with the artisan migrate command:

php artisan migrate

After the migration, four new tables will be present:

roles — stores role records
permissions — stores permission records
role_user — stores many-to-many relations between roles and users
permission_role — stores many-to-many relations between roles and permissions

Models

Role

Create a Role model inside app/models/Role.php using the following example:

<?php namespace App;

use Zizaco\Entrust\EntrustRole;

class Role extends EntrustRole
{
}

The Role model has three main attributes:

name — Unique name for the Role, used for looking up role information in the application layer. For example: "admin", "owner", "employee".
display_name — Human readable name for the Role. Not necessarily unique and optional. For example: "User Administrator", "Project Owner", "Widget Co. Employee".
description — A more detailed explanation of what the Role does. Also optional.

Both display_name and description are optional; their fields are nullable in the database.

Permission

Create a Permission model inside app/models/Permission.php using the following example:

<?php namespace App;

use Zizaco\Entrust\EntrustPermission;

class Permission extends EntrustPermission
{
}

The Permission model has the same three attributes as the Role:

name — Unique name for the permission, used for looking up permission information in the application layer. For example: "create-post", "edit-user", "post-payment", "mailing-list-subscribe".
display_name — Human readable name for the permission. Not necessarily unique and optional. For example "Create Posts", "Edit Users", "Post Payments", "Subscribe to mailing list".
description — A more detailed explanation of the Permission.

In general, it may be helpful to think of the last two attributes in the form of a sentence: "The permission display_name allows a user to description."

User

Next, use the EntrustUserTrait trait in your existing User model. For example:

<?php

use Zizaco\Entrust\Traits\EntrustUserTrait;

class User extends Eloquent
{
    use EntrustUserTrait; // add this trait to your user model

    ...
}

This will enable the relation with Role and add the following methods roles(), hasRole($name), withRole($name), hasPermission($permission), and ability($roles, $permissions, $options) within your User model.

Don't forget to dump composer autoload

composer dump-autoload

And you are ready to go.

Soft Deleting

The default migration takes advantage of onDelete('cascade') clauses within the pivot tables to remove relations when a parent record is deleted. If for some reason you cannot use cascading deletes in your database, the EntrustRole and EntrustPermission classes, and the HasRole trait include event listeners to manually delete records in relevant pivot tables. In the interest of not accidentally deleting data, the event listeners will not delete pivot data if the model uses soft deleting. However, due to limitations in Laravel's event listeners, there is no way to distinguish between a call to delete() versus a call to forceDelete(). For this reason, before you force delete a model, you must manually delete any of the relationship data (unless your pivot tables uses cascading deletes). For example:

$role = Role::findOrFail(1); // Pull back a given role

// Regular Delete
$role->delete(); // This will work no matter what

// Force Delete
$role->users()->sync([]); // Delete relationship data
$role->perms()->sync([]); // Delete relationship data

$role->forceDelete(); // Now force delete will work regardless of whether the pivot table has cascading delete

Usage

Concepts

Let's start by creating the following Roles and Permissions:

$owner = new Role();
$owner->name         = 'owner';
$owner->display_name = 'Project Owner'; // optional
$owner->description  = 'User is the owner of a given project'; // optional
$owner->save();

$admin = new Role();
$admin->name         = 'admin';
$admin->display_name = 'User Administrator'; // optional
$admin->description  = 'User is allowed to manage and edit other users'; // optional
$admin->save();

Next, with both roles created let's assign them to the users. Thanks to the HasRole trait this is as easy as:

$user = User::where('username', '=', 'michele')->first();

// role attach alias
$user->attachRole($admin); // parameter can be an Role object, array, or id

// or eloquent's original technique
$user->roles()->attach($admin->id); // id only

Now we just need to add permissions to those Roles:

$createPost = new Permission();
$createPost->name         = 'create-post';
$createPost->display_name = 'Create Posts'; // optional
// Allow a user to...
$createPost->description  = 'create new blog posts'; // optional
$createPost->save();

$editUser = new Permission();
$editUser->name         = 'edit-user';
$editUser->display_name = 'Edit Users'; // optional
// Allow a user to...
$editUser->description  = 'edit existing users'; // optional
$editUser->save();

$admin->attachPermission($createPost);
// equivalent to $admin->perms()->sync(array($createPost->id));

$owner->attachPermissions(array($createPost, $editUser));
// equivalent to $owner->perms()->sync(array($createPost->id, $editUser->id));

Checking for Roles & Permissions

Now we can check for roles and permissions simply by doing:

$user->hasRole('owner');   // false
$user->hasRole('admin');   // true
$user->hasPermission('edit-user');   // false
$user->hasPermission('create-post'); // true

Both hasRole() and hasPermission() can receive an array of roles & permissions to check:

$user->hasRole(['owner', 'admin']);       // true
$user->hasPermission(['edit-user', 'create-post']); // true

By default, if any of the roles or permissions are present for a user then the method will return true. Passing true as a second parameter instructs the method to require all of the items:

$user->hasRole(['owner', 'admin']);             // true
$user->hasRole(['owner', 'admin'], true);       // false, user does not have admin role
$user->hasPermission(['edit-user', 'create-post']);       // true
$user->hasPermission(['edit-user', 'create-post'], true); // false, user does not have edit-user permission

You can have as many Roles as you want for each User and vice versa.

The Entrust class has shortcuts to both can() and hasRole() for the currently logged in user. The user model method is named hasPermission() to avoid colliding with Laravel's Gate-aware can() method:

Entrust::hasRole('role-name');
Entrust::can('permission-name');

// is identical to

Auth::user()->hasRole('role-name');
Auth::user()->hasPermission('permission-name');

You can also use placeholders (wildcards) to check any matching permission by doing:

// match any admin permission
$user->hasPermission("admin.*"); // true

// match any permission about users
$user->hasPermission("*_users"); // true

To filter users according a specific role, you may use withRole() scope, for example to retrieve all admins:

$admins = User::withRole('admin')->get();
// or maybe with a relationsship
$company->users()->withRole('admin')->get();

User ability

More advanced checking can be done using the awesome ability function. It takes in three parameters (roles, permissions, options):

roles is a set of roles to check.
permissions is a set of permissions to check.

Either of the roles or permissions variable can be a comma separated string or array:

$user->ability(array('admin', 'owner'), array('create-post', 'edit-user'));

// or

$user->ability('admin,owner', 'create-post,edit-user');

This will check whether the user has any of the provided roles and permissions. In this case it will return true since the user is an admin and has the create-post permission.

The third parameter is an options array:

$options = array(
    'validate_all' => true | false (Default: false),
    'return_type'  => boolean | array | both (Default: boolean)
);

validate_all is a boolean flag to set whether to check all the values for true, or to return true if at least one role or permission is matched.
return_type specifies whether to return a boolean, array of checked values, or both in an array.

Here is an example output:

$options = array(
    'validate_all' => true,
    'return_type' => 'both'
);

list($validate, $allValidations) = $user->ability(
    array('admin', 'owner'),
    array('create-post', 'edit-user'),
    $options
);

var_dump($validate);
// bool(false)

var_dump($allValidations);
// array(4) {
//     ['role'] => bool(true)
//     ['role_2'] => bool(false)
//     ['create-post'] => bool(true)
//     ['edit-user'] => bool(false)
// }

The Entrust class has a shortcut to ability() for the currently logged in user:

Entrust::ability('admin,owner', 'create-post,edit-user');

// is identical to

Auth::user()->ability('admin,owner', 'create-post,edit-user');

Blade templates

Three directives are available for use within your Blade templates. What you give as the directive arguments will be directly passed to the corresponding Entrust function.

@role('admin')
    <p>This is visible to users with the admin role. Gets translated to
    \Entrust::role('admin')</p>
@endrole

@permission('manage-admins')
    <p>This is visible to users with the given permissions. Gets translated to
    \Entrust::can('manage-admins'). The @can directive is already taken by core
    laravel authorization package, hence the @permission directive instead.</p>
@endpermission

@ability('admin,owner', 'create-post,edit-user')
    <p>This is visible to users with the given abilities. Gets translated to
    \Entrust::ability('admin,owner', 'create-post,edit-user')</p>
@endability

Middleware

You can use a middleware to filter routes and route groups by permission or role

Route::group(['prefix' => 'admin', 'middleware' => ['role:admin']], function() {
    Route::get('/', 'AdminController@welcome');
    Route::get('/manage', ['middleware' => ['permission:manage-admins'], 'uses' => 'AdminController@manageAdmins']);
});

It is possible to use pipe symbol as OR operator:

'middleware' => ['role:admin|root']

To emulate AND functionality just use multiple instances of middleware

'middleware' => ['role:owner', 'role:writer']

For more complex situations use ability middleware which accepts 3 parameters: roles, permissions, validate_all

'middleware' => ['ability:admin|owner,create-post|edit-user,true']

As you can see, Entrust::hasRole() and Entrust::can() check if the user is logged in, and then if they have the role or permission. If the user is not logged the return will also be false.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter an error when doing the migration that looks like:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can't create table 'laravelbootstrapstarter.#sql-42c_f8' (errno: 150)
    (SQL: alter table `role_user` add constraint role_user_user_id_foreign foreign key (`user_id`)
    references `users` (`id`)) (Bindings: array ())

Then it's likely that the id column in your user table does not match the user_id column in role_user. Laravel's default user id is an unsigned big integer, and the generated migration now uses unsignedBigInteger for pivot foreign keys.

When trying to use the EntrustUserTrait methods, you encounter the error which looks like

Class name must be a valid object or a string

then probably you don't have published Entrust assets or something went wrong when you did it. First of all check that you have the entrust.php file in your config directory. If you don't, then try php artisan vendor:publish --tag=entrust-config and, if it does not appear, manually copy the /vendor/zizaco/entrust/src/config/config.php file in your config directory and rename it entrust.php.

If your app uses a custom namespace then you'll need to tell entrust where your permission and role models are, you can do this by editing the config file in config/entrust.php

'role' => 'Custom\Namespace\Role'

'permission' => 'Custom\Namespace\permission'

License

Entrust is free software distributed under the terms of the MIT license.

Contribution guidelines

Support follows PSR-1 and PSR-4 PHP coding standards, and semantic versioning.

Please report any issue you find in the issues page. Pull requests are welcome.

sunergix / entrust-permissions

Maintainers

Package info

Statistics

Security