Roles vs Permissions

Best-Practice for thinking about Roles vs Permissions is this:

Roles are best to only assign to Users in order to "group" people by "sets of permissions".

Permissions are best assigned to roles. The more granular/detailed your permission-names (such as separate permissions like "view document" and "edit document"), the easier it is to control access in your application.

Users should rarely be given "direct" permissions. Best if Users inherit permissions via the Roles that they're assigned to.

When designed this way, all the sections of your application can check for specific permissions needed to access certain features or perform certain actions AND this way you can always use the native Laravel @can and can() directives everywhere in your app, which allows Laravel's Gate layer to do all the heavy lifting.

Example: it's safer to have your Views test @can('view member addresses') or @can('edit document'), INSTEAD of testing for $user->hasRole('Editor'). It's easier to control displaying a "section" of content vs edit/delete buttons if you have "view document" and "edit document" permissions defined. And then Writer role would get both "view" and "edit" assigned to it. And then the user would get the Writer role.

This also allows you to treat permission names as static (only editable by developers), and then your application (almost) never needs to know anything about role names, so you could (almost) change role names at will.

Summary:

• users have roles
• roles have permissions
• app always checks for permissions (as much as possible), not roles
• views check permission-names
• policies check permission-names
• model policies check permission-names
• controller methods check permission-names
• middleware check permission names, or sometimes role-names
• routes check permission-names, or maybe role-names if you need to code that way.

Sometimes certain groups of route rules may make best sense to group them around a role, but still, whenever possible, there is less overhead used if you can check against a specific permission instead.