Entrust for Laravel

Laravel 5.2 comes with user support out of the box but it has a lack of support for roles and permissions. Doing a little of research I found a package to work with Roles and Permissions in Laravel called Entrust (https://github.com/Zizaco/entrust).

This post it’s going to be about the installation, in other post we will cover how to use it and how to create a management UI for users and permissions.

This post asumes that you are currently working in laravel 5.2.

First of all, include the package in composer.json

“require” : {
…
"zizaco/entrust": "5.2.x-dev"
}


Next run composer update to install the new package.

Configuration

Next step is to add the service provider in the app. Add this into the providers array (config/app.php)

Zizaco\Entrust\EntrustServiceProvider::class

Add these entries to the $routeMiddleware array in app/Http/Kernel.php

'role' => Zizaco\Entrust\Middleware\EntrustRole::class,
'permission' => Zizaco\Entrust\Middleware\EntrustPermission::class,
'ability' => Zizaco\Entrust\Middleware\EntrustAbility::class,


In order to work entrust need a configuration file to set the mappings between models and tables. To create the config file run.

php artisan vendor:publish


This will create a file called entrust.php with a default configuration, that configuration will work in most cases.

Entrust uses cache tagging, this kind of caching is not available in file storage, you’ll have to change it to array or memcache. Go to your .env file and check this configuration.

CACHE_DRIVER=memcached

or

CACHE_DRIVER=array

Database Tables

Now generate the Entrust migration:

php artisan entrust:migration

You may now run it with the artisan migrate command:

php artisan migrate

After the migration, four new tables will be present:

• roles — stores role records
• permissions — stores permission records
• role_user — stores many-to-many relations between roles and users
• permission_role — stores many-to-many relations between roles and permissions

Models

You’ll have to create and modify your models to make it work.

Create a Role model inside app/models/Role.php using the following example:

Permission

Create a Permission model inside app/models/Permission.php using the following example:

User

Next, use the EntrustUserTrait trait in your existing User model. For example:

This will enable the relation with Role and add the following methods roles(), hasRole($name), can($permission), and ability($roles, $permissions, $options) within your User model.

Seeding

A good idea will be to create a default seed, this it’s going to depend of your project requirements but here is a sample to give you an idea.

Run this artisan command to create a Seeder class

php artisan make:seeder RolesPerms

This will create a seeder file into database/seeds/RolePerms.php

This can be a basic content

To seed this file

artisan db:seed --class=RolesPerms

That’s it, now you are ready to go. We will see in other post how to use this package in our code.