Authorization

After setting up the Restify configuration and the authentication, the next logical step is to protect your API Repositories against unauthorized users.

Request lifecycle

Before diving into details about authorization, it is important for you to understand what is the actual lifecycle of the request. On that account, you can know what to expect and how to debug your app at any point.

Booting

When you run a request (ie via Postman), it hits the Laravel application. Laravel will load every single Service Provider it has defined into config/app.php and auto discovered providers as well.

Restify injects the RestifyApplicationServiceProvider in your config/app.php and it also has an auto discovered provider called LaravelRestify\LaravelRestifyServiceProvider.

• The LaravelRestifyServiceProvider is booted first. This will basically push the RestifyInjector middleware at the end of the middleware stack.

• Then, the RestifyApplicationServiceProvider is booted. This will define the gate, will load repositories and make the auth routes macro. You now have full control over this provider.

• The RestifyInjector will be handled. It will register all the routes.

• On each request, if the requested route is a Restify route, Laravel will handle other middlewares defined in the restify.php -> middleware.

View Restify

Since we are now aware of how Restify boots itself, let's see how to guard it.

Let's take a closer look at the package's global gate:

// app/Providers/RestifyServiceProvider.php

protected function gate()
{
    Gate::define('viewRestify', function ($user) {
        return in_array($user->email, [
            //
        ]);
    });
}

This is the first gate to access the Restify repositories. In a real-life project, you may allow every authenticated user to have access to repositories and just after that, by using policies you can restrict certain specific actions. To do so:

Gate::define('viewRestify', function ($user) {
    return true;
});

If you want to allow unauthenticated users to be authorized to see the restify routes, you can nullify the $user:

Gate::define('viewRestify', function ($user = null) {
    return true;
});

From this point, it's highly recommended to have a policy for each model exposed via Restify. Otherwise, users may access unauthorized resources, which is not what we want.

Policies

If you are not aware of what a policy is, we highly recommend reading the documentation before you move forward.

You can use the Laravel command for generating a policy. It is greatly recommended to generate a policy using the Restify command because it will scaffold Restify's CRUD authorization methods for you:

php artisan restify:policy UserPolicy

It will automatically detect the User model (the word before Policy). However, you can set out the following example:

php artisan restify:policy PostPolicy --model=Post

If you already have a policy, here is the Restify default scaffolded one so you can apply these methods on your own:

namespace App\Policies;

use App\Models\Post;
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Auth\Access\HandlesAuthorization;

class PostPolicy
{
    use HandlesAuthorization;

    public function allowRestify(User $user = null): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function show(User $user, Post $model): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function store(User $user): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function storeBulk(User $user): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function update(User $user, Post $model): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function updateBulk(User $user, Post $model): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function delete(User $user, Post $model): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function restore(User $user, Post $model): bool
    {
        //
    }

    public function forceDelete(User $user, Post $model): bool
    {
        //
    }
}

Allow restify

Just after Restify detects the repository class, it will invoke this method to check if the given user can load this repository in any manner. You can also check if the user is an admin for some specific repositories, such as:

// PostPolicy
/**
 * Determine whether the user can use restify feature for each CRUD operation.
 * So if this is not allowed, all operations will be disabled
 * @param User $user
 * @return mixed
 */
public function allowRestify(User $user)
{
    return $user->isAdmin();
}

Allow show

From here, each policy corresponds to an exposed Restify route.

In addition, the show method, corresponds to the following routes:

POST: /api/restify/posts // it will filter out the entities you don't have access to from the pagination

and:

POST: /api/restify/posts/{id} // it will give a 403 Forbidden status if you don't have access to the resource

Definition:

/**
 * Determine whether the user can get the model.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @param Post $model
 * @return mixed
 */
public function show(User $user, Post $model)
{
    //
}

Allow store

Determine if a specific user has access to the POST's route in order to create an entity.

The store method, corresponds to the following route:

POST: /api/restify/posts

Definition:

/**
 * Determine whether the user can create models.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @return mixed
 */
public function store(User $user)
{
    //
}

Allow storeBulk

Determine if the user can store multiple entities at once.

The storeBulk method corresponds to the following route:

POST: api/posts/bulk

Definition:

/**
 * Determine whether the user can create multiple models at once.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @return mixed
 */
public function storeBulk(User $user)
{
    //
}

Allow update

Determine if the user can update a specific model.

The update method corresponds to the following routes:

PUT: api/restify/posts/{id}

PATCH: api/restify/posts/{id}

POST: api/restify/posts/{id}

Definition:

/**
 * Determine whether the user can update the model.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @param Post $model
 * @return mixed
 */
public function update(User $user, Post $model)
{
    //
}

Allow updateBulk

Determine if the user can update multiple entities at once. When you bulk update, this method will be invoked for each entity you're trying to update. If at least one will return false - none will be updated. The reason behind that is that the bulk update is a DB transaction.

The updateBulk method, corresponds to the following route:

POST: api/restify/posts/bulk/update

Definition:

/**
 * Determine whether the user can update bulk the model.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @param Post $model
 * @return mixed
 */
public function updateBulk(User $user = null, Post $model)
{
    return true;
}

Allow delete

The delete endpoint policy.

The delete method, corresponds to the following route:

DELETE: api/restify/posts/{id}

Definition:

/**
 * Determine whether the user can delete the model.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @param Post $model
 * @return mixed
 */
public function delete(User $user, Post $model)
{
    //
}

Allow Attach

When attaching a model to another, we should check if the user is also able to do that. For example, attaching posts to a user:

POST: api/restify/users/{id}/attach/posts

{ "posts": [1, 2, 3] }

Restify will guess the policy's name by the related entity. For this reason, it will be attachPost:

// UserPolicy.php

/**
 * Determine if the post could be attached to the user.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @param Post $model
 * @return mixed
 */
public function attachPost(User $user, Post $model)
{
    return $user->is($model->creator()->first());
}

The attachPost method will be called for each individual post.

Allow Detach

When detaching a model from another, we should check if the user is also able to do that. For example, detaching posts from a user:

POST: api/restify/users/{id}/detach/posts

{ "posts": [1, 2, 3] }

Restify will guess the policy's name by the related entity. For this reason, it will be detachPost:

/**
 * Determine if the post could be attached to the user.
 *
 * @param User $user
 * @param Post $model
 * @return mixed
 */
public function attachPost(User $user, Post $model)
{
    return $user->is($model->creator()->first());
}

The detachPost method, will be called for each post in part.

Register Policy

A common mistake is that sometimes you may define a policy, but you don't attach it to a model in your app/Providers/AuthServiceProvider.php. Make sure you have it figured out here.

See documentation.