When building Laravel applications, handling roles and permissions correctly is absolutely crucial. Getting this right ensures your application remains secure, flexible, and maintainable as it grows. However, many developers, especially juniors, often stumble on common pitfalls that can lead to messy code, fragile security, or difficult-to-maintain projects. Drawing from best practices, including those from the popular spatie/laravel-permission package and insights from Filament projects, this article will walk you through the top three mistakes developers make with roles and permissions—and how to avoid them.
Understanding Roles vs Permissions: The First and Biggest Mistake
One of the most fundamental errors is confusing roles with permissions and mixing their usage in your application logic. This mistake is so prevalent that even the spatie/laravel-permission documentation highlights it explicitly in their best practices section.
“In controllers or Blade views, do not check for roles. Check for permissions for that action. Roles may or may not exist in the layer of gates or policies.”
Why does this matter? Roles are essentially collections of permissions. A role might be “editor” or “writer,” but what really controls access to specific actions is the permission itself, such as update posts or delete posts. Checking roles directly in controllers or views results in inflexible and error-prone code.
What Does the Wrong Approach Look Like?
Imagine you have a controller method where you check if a user has a certain role before allowing them to perform an action:
if ($user->hasRole('editor')) { /* allow editing */ }
Or in Blade templates:
@if(auth()->user()->hasRole('editor')) Show Edit Button @endif
This approach might work fine in small projects with limited roles and permissions, but it quickly becomes a nightmare as your application grows. For example, what if you later introduce a new role that should also have edit capabilities? You would have to hunt down every controller and view where you check for roles and update those conditions. Additionally, what if some permissions depend on more complex logic, like ownership of a resource or its publication status?
Here’s a more complex example from a destroy method:
if (!$user->hasRole('editor') && $post->author_id !== $user->id && !$post->is_published) { abort(403); }
As you see, the conditions pile up, making your controller bloated and harder to maintain.
The Right Approach: Use Permissions and Policies
The recommended approach involves checking for specific permissions rather than roles. In Laravel, this is elegantly handled using policies and gates. Instead of sprinkling role checks throughout your controllers and views, you define permission logic in a single place: your policy classes.
For example, in the controller, you would use:
$this->authorize('update', $post);
And in Blade views:
@can('update', $post) Show Edit Button @endcan
Inside your policy, you define the logic for the update permission:
public function update(User $user, Post $post) { return $user->hasPermissionTo('update posts') && ($post->author_id === $user->id || $user->hasRole('editor')); }
This way, all the complex conditions are centralized, making your controllers cleaner and your views simpler. If you need to change the permission logic, you only update your policy, and the rest of your application automatically respects the new rules.
This practice not only aligns with Laravel’s MVC principles—keeping business logic out of controllers—but also makes your application more adaptable and secure.
Mistake #2: Neglecting Comprehensive Automated Testing for Roles and Permissions
Permissions are the backbone of your application’s security. Yet, it’s astonishing how often developers either skip writing tests for authorization altogether or write only minimal tests covering the “happy path” for a single role.
Failing to thoroughly test every role and permission scenario is a serious oversight. It can lead to unauthorized access slipping through unnoticed, which might have catastrophic consequences depending on your app’s nature.
Common Testing Pitfalls
- Testing only one role (e.g., just the writer role) and ignoring others like editor or admin.
- Testing only allowed scenarios but not forbidden ones (e.g., a writer accessing their own post but not testing access to others’ posts).
- Not covering edge cases like published vs unpublished posts or ownership conditions.
What Should You Test?
Here are some examples of comprehensive tests you should write:
- Does the writer role have access to the posts index?
- Can a writer store a new post?
- Can a writer access the edit page for their own post?
- Is a writer prevented from accessing the edit page for someone else’s post?
- Can a writer delete an unpublished post but not a published post?
- Repeat similar tests for editor and other roles, checking both allowed and disallowed actions.
Automating Tests Efficiently
Writing all these tests might seem time-consuming, but modern tools and AI assistance can speed up the process significantly. For example, using AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT can generate test boilerplate quickly, which you can then customize.
Remember, testing roles and permissions is not just about code coverage; it’s about securing your application. Unauthorized access often does not throw exceptions—meaning bugs related to permissions can be silent and hard to detect without proper tests.
By investing time in thorough automated testing, you prevent subtle security holes and ensure your application behaves correctly as it evolves.
Mistake #3: Relying Only on Frontend Visibility for Permission Checks
This is a classic but dangerous mistake that sometimes even experienced developers make. It involves restricting access by only hiding or showing buttons, links, or UI elements based on roles or permissions, without enforcing those restrictions on the backend.
For example, in Filament (a popular Laravel admin panel), you might conditionally show an “Edit” button only if the user is an admin:
->visible(fn(User $user) => $user->hasRole('admin'))
On the surface, this seems fine—non-admin users don’t see the edit button. But what if a non-admin user knows the direct URL to the edit page? If there is no backend authorization check, they can simply bypass the UI restriction and edit the resource.
How to Fix This Mistake?
The solution is to always enforce permissions on the backend, ideally using Laravel’s policies or gates. In Filament, the framework integrates with policies automatically. If you define an update method in your policy, Filament will use it to control both the visibility of the edit button and the actual authorization to perform the action.
This means you don’t even have to manually specify visibility conditions in many cases; Filament handles it by checking the policy method behind the scenes.
Here’s what a policy method might look like:
public function update(User $user, User $model) { return $user->hasRole('admin'); }
With this in place, even if someone tries to access the edit page directly, Laravel will deny the request unless the policy returns true.
Summary and Final Thoughts
Roles and permissions are at the heart of any secure Laravel application. Getting them right means more than just assigning roles and toggling UI elements. It involves:
- Checking permissions, not roles, in your controllers and views using policies and gates to centralize and simplify your authorization logic.
- Writing thorough automated tests for every role and permission scenario to prevent silent security breaches.
- Enforcing permissions on the backend, not just hiding UI elements, to prevent unauthorized access even if someone knows direct URLs.
Following these best practices will save you from many headaches as your Laravel application grows in complexity and user base. If you want to dive deeper into these topics, the official Spatie Laravel Permission best practices.
What are your experiences with roles and permissions in Laravel? Have you encountered other challenges or best practices? Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments below—let’s learn from each other.
