It’s been over a year since I covered how to protect adminpanel routes in Laravel using Gates. Some people kept reminding me about my promise to cover ACL and user roles, and I kept putting off fulfilling that promise.

Finally I run into that on one of my projects, and that’s the sign I was waiting for to continue giving back to the community I learned so much from.

What is ACL

Although some computer science theorists enjoy using baffling definitions of the term (looking at you, MSDN), in reality it’s pretty simple and straightforward. ACL stands for Access Control List, and specifies what users are allowed to do.

There are three entities in the ACL:

• User Role: e.g. admin, editor, reader
• Object: e.g. blog post
• Operation: create, edit, read, etc.

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Today we’ll learn how to protect adminpanel and enhance authorization component of a Laravel application by adding user roles. We will assign each user with a role (e.g. superadmin, admin, member), create an Auth Gate, modify the User model, and utilize the Authenticate middleware to help them get along. Furthermore, we’ll build a skeleton of your future ACL system, which you can adjust and improve according to your needs.

Laravel provides us with a chance to save enormous amount of time on one condition – we should know how to use it. I’m pretty sure anybody who learned Laravel was not only impressed by how simple a complex task can be done, but also by complexity of seemingly simple tasks. The perfect example is authentication – you can create it with a single Artisan command and Laravel will take care of the rest. On the other hand, many beginners struggle with authorization and don’t know how to approach protecting the admin area. Obviously, it’s a trivial task if you have some PHP experience, but doing it the Laravel Way may be tricky.

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