This tutorial gives a step by step guide on how to setup Role based authentication in Laravel along with it’s native authentication system.
We are using Laravel 5.5 for this tutorial.
Role Based Authentication / Authorization
Let’s just take a moment to understand role based authorization and what you can achieve with this. Let’s say you are building a application which will be used by variety of customers. There are parts of your application (a method, some routes or full controller) which should only be accessible by customers that have a certain privilege.
This is where you can make use of role based authentication system. It requires a couple of extra tables to be created in your database to define all the roles that exist in your application and also to map your user to certain roles.
Let’s dive into the steps.
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To showcase the role based authentication.Lets create two sections in the application one is Admin and another is Super-Admin. After user is logged in they require a specific role privilege to enter this area of application.
Setup Laravel Authentication
If you have done fresh Laravel installation and haven’t yet configured the Laravel’s out of box authentication.
Please Setup Laravel Authentication before starting with Role based Authentication system.
Create Controllers
Let’s create two new controller’s AdminController and SuperAdminController
php artisan make:controller AdminController
php artisan make:controller SuperAdminControllerAdd index method to both the controller
//Index method for Admin Controller
public function index()
{
return view('admin.home');
}
//Index method for SuperAdmin Controller
public function index()
{
return view('superadmin.home');
}
index method from AdminController returns the home page from admin folder and index method for SuperAdmin Controller returns the home page which is in superadmin view folder.
Create Views
Let’s now build home page views for both admin and superadmin sections of the application.
Create new folder admin under resources > views and add new file home.blade.php
@extends('layouts.app')
@section('content')
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">
<div class="panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-heading">Admin Dashboard</div>
<div class="panel-body">
@if (session('status'))
<div class="alert alert-success">
{{ session('status') }}
</div>
@endif
This is Admin Dashboard. You must be privileged to be here !
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
@endsection
Next, Create new folder superadmin under resources > views and add new file home.blade.php
@extends('layouts.app')
@section('content')
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">
<div class="panel panel-default">
<div class="panel-heading">Super Admin Dashboard</div>
<div class="panel-body">
@if (session('status'))
<div class="alert alert-success">
{{ session('status') }}
</div>
@endif
This is Admin Dashboard. You must be super privileged to be here !
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
@endsection
Add route entry into routes / web.php file
Route::get('/admin', 'AdminController@index');
Route::get('/superadmin', 'SuperAdminController@index')Create the Role model and setup migration
php artisan make:model Role -m
This will create a Model class for the roles table and will also create a migrations file under database > migrations
Edit the CreateRolesTable class under migrations folder
<?php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
class CreateRolesTable extends Migration
{
/**
* Run the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
Schema::create('roles', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->string('name');
$table->string('description');
$table->timestamps();
});
}
/**
* Reverse the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
Schema::dropIfExists('roles');
}
}
Create Migration for the role_user table
We need another table , which hold’s that data of which role is assigned to which user.
php artisan make:migration create_role_user_table
Edit the CreateRoleUserTable class in the migrations folder:
<?php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
class CreateRoleUserTable extends Migration
{
/**
* Run the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
Schema::create('role_user', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->integer('role_id')->unsigned();
$table->integer('user_id')->unsigned();
$table->timestamps();
});
}
/**
* Reverse the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
Schema::dropIfExists('role_user');
}
}
Next, we need to provide many-to-many relationship between User and Role
Add roles() method to your User.php class
public function roles()
{
return $this
->belongsToMany('App\Role')
->withTimestamps();
}Add users() to your Role.php class
public function users()
{
return $this
->belongsToMany('App\User')
->withTimestamps();
}Create tables and add data for testing
You can now run the migrate command to create the tables in database
php artisan migrate
Running the migrate command creates following tables in your database. You can choose to fill the data for testing either manually or via Seeding.
I have created two Roles with name ROLE_ADMIN and ROLE_SUPERADMIN. Users assigned the role of ROLE_ADMIN should have access to Admin Section of Application. Same applies to super admin users.
You can register new user’s by going into /register url, after you have added few user’s you can assign roles to user in role_user table.
I have assigned some sample roles to the user.
Just a few more steps, Don’t give up !
Modify User.php
Open user.php and add these tiny methods which will be used to check if user has a particular role or roles
public function authorizeRoles($roles)
{
if ($this->hasAnyRole($roles)) {
return true;
}
abort(401, 'This action is unauthorized.');
}
public function hasAnyRole($roles)
{
if (is_array($roles)) {
foreach ($roles as $role) {
if ($this->hasRole($role)) {
return true;
}
}
} else {
if ($this->hasRole($roles)) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
public function hasRole($role)
{
if ($this->roles()->where(‘name’, $role)->first()) {
return true;
}
return false;
}With the above methods, if you are looking to check just against a single role you can make use of hasRole method.
Or You can check against multiple roles by passing an array to authorizeRoles method.
Currently we are only looking to compare against a single role, We will make use of hasRole method. Let’s go ahead and create the Middleware for the same.
Create Middleware
We will create a new middleware CheckRole
php artisan make:middleware CheckRoleModify the CheckRole.php file under app > Middleware
<?php
namespace App\Http\Middleware;
use Closure;
class CheckRole
{
/**
* Handle an incoming request.
*
* @param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request
* @param \Closure $next
* @return mixed
*/
public function handle($request, Closure $next, $role)
{
if (! $request->user()->hasRole($role)) {
abort(401, 'This action is unauthorized.');
}
return $next($request);
}
}
We have modified the handle method middleware to check for given role.
Next step is to register the middleware we just created. Open Kernal.php which is located under App > and modify array $routeMiddleware to include the role middleware.
protected $routeMiddleware = [
'auth' => \Illuminate\Auth\Middleware\Authenticate::class,
'auth.basic' => \Illuminate\Auth\Middleware\AuthenticateWithBasicAuth::class,
'bindings' => \Illuminate\Routing\Middleware\SubstituteBindings::class,
'can' => \Illuminate\Auth\Middleware\Authorize::class,
'guest' => \App\Http\Middleware\RedirectIfAuthenticated::class,
'throttle' => \Illuminate\Routing\Middleware\ThrottleRequests::class,
'role' => \App\Http\Middleware\CheckRole::class,
];
Modify Controllers
Open AdminController.php. Below code in constructor method will check if the logged in user has role ROLE_ADMIN associated with it.
public function __construct()
{
$this->middleware('auth');
$this->middleware('role:ROLE_ADMIN');
}same for SuperAdminController.php
public function __construct()
{
$this->middleware('auth');
$this->middleware('role:ROLE_SUPERADMIN');
}That’s it ! Only privileged user can access the certain parts of your application.
