Access policies

Access Policies ensure that we provide specific access to resources for users. You may want to open publicly the read access for an entity while limiting creation to logged in users for example.

Acces policies are a way to implement Authorization following the RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) method. Indeed it is possible to create different entities (ex: User, Manager...) with different access to resources.

Policies can be added to entities or endpoints.

Syntax

The policies for each rule can be added to each entity description as shown below:

entities:
  Invoice 🧾:
    properties:
      - number
      - { name: issueDate, type: date }
    policies:
      create:
        - { access: restricted, allow: User } # Only logged in users can create.
      read:
        - access: public # All read endpoints are public.
      update:
        - access: admin # Only logged in admins can update.
      delete:
        - access: forbidden # No one can delete (even admins!)

In this case, everyone can see the Invoice items, only logged-in Users can create new ones. Updating an Invoice is restricted to Admins only and no one can delete them (not even Admins).

By default, all rules access are set to admin and thus only visible by logged-in Admins.

Prop	Description	Type
access	The type of access: public, restricted, admin, forbidden	AccessType
allow	Only for restricted access: the entity (or entities) that have access	string | string[]

Access types

There are 4 possible access types:

Access	Description	Short version (emoji)
public	Everyone has access	🌐
restricted	Only logged-in users have access to it. If allow key specifies one or several entities, users logged in as other entities will not have access. Admins always have access to restricted rules	🔒
admin	Only admins have access	👨🏻‍💻
forbidden	No one has access, not even admins	🚫

Entity rules

Each entity has 5 rules where one or several access policies can be applied:

• create: create a new item
• read: see the detail and the list of items
• update: update an existing item
• delete: delete an existing item
• signup: sign up as a new user (only for authenticable entities)

By default, all rules have the admin access type

Additional examples

entities:
  Project 🗂️:
    properties:
      - name
    policies:
      read:
        - { access: restricted, allow: [Contributor, Manager] } # Only some entities (and admins).
      create:
        - { access: restricted, allow: Manager } # Only managers (and admins).
      update:
        - access: 👨🏻‍💻 # Only admin.
      delete:
        - access: 🚫 # Forbidden (no one).

  Contributor 👨‍💼:
    authenticable: true
    properties:
      - name
    policies:
      signup:
        - access: 🚫 # Forbidden (no one).
      create:
        - { access: 🔒, allow: Manager } # Managers can create contributors.
      update:
        - { access: 🔒, allow: Manager }
      delete:
        - { access: 🔒, allow: Manager } # Managers can create contributors.

endpoints:
  basicEndpoint:
    path: /basic
    description: A basic endpoint that returns a simple message.
    method: GET
    handler: basicEndpoint
    policies:
      - access: public # This endpoint is public.