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Eacus, the holder of the keys of Hades, is an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) authorization framework for Ruby.

Eaco e Telamone

"Aeacus telemon by user Ravenous at en.wikipedia.org - Public domain through Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aeacus_telemon.jpg"


Eaco provides your application's Resources discretionary access based on attributes. Access to a Resource by an Actor is determined by checking whether the Actor owns the security attributes (Designators) required by the Resource.

Each Resource protected by Eaco has an ACL attached. ACLs define which security attribute grant access to the Resource, and at which level. The level of access is expressed in terms of roles. Roles are scoped per Resource types.

Each Role then describes a set of abilities that it can perform. In your code, you check directly whether an Actor has a specific ability on a Resource, and all the indirection is then evaluated by Eaco.


Security attributes are extracted out of Actors through the Designators framework, a pluggable mechanism whose details are up to your application.

An Actor can have many designators, that describe its identity or its belonging to a group or occupying a position in a department.

Designators are Ruby classes that can embed any sort of custom behaviour that your application requires.


ACLs are hashes with designators as keys and roles as values. Extracting authorized collections requires only an hash key lookup mechanism in your database. Adapters are provided for PG's +jsonb+ and for CouchDB-Lucene.


Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'eaco'

And then execute:

$ bundle


Create config/authorization.rb (rdoc)

# Defines `Document` to be an authorized resource.
# Adds Document.accessible_by and Document#allows?
authorize Document, using: :pg_jsonb do
  roles :owner, :editor, :reader

  permissions do
    reader   :read
    editor   reader, :edit
    owner    editor, :destroy

# Defines an actor and the sources from which the
# designators are harvested.
# Adds User#designators
actor User do
  admin do |user|

  designators do
    user  from: :id
    group from: :groups
    tag   from: :tags

Given a Resource (rdoc) with an ACL (rdoc):

# An example ACL
>> document = Document.first
=> #<Document id:42 name:"President's report for loans.docx" [...]>

>> document.acl
=> #<Document::ACL {"user:10" => :owner, "group:reviewers" => :reader}>

and an Actor (rdoc):

# An example Actor
>> user = User.find(10)
=> #<User id:10 name:"Bob Fropp" group_ids:['employees'], tags:['english']>

>> user.designators
=> #<Set{ #<Designator(User) value:10>, #<Designator(Group) value:"employees">, #<Designator(Tag) value:"english"> }

you can check if the Actor can perform a specific action on the Resource:

>> user.can? :read, document
=> true

>> document.allows? :read, user
=> true

and which access level (role) the Actor has for this Resource:

>> document.role_of user
=> :owner

>> boss = User.find_by_group('reviewer').first
=> #<User id:42 name:"Jake Leister" group_ids:['reviewers', 'bosses']>

>> document.role_of boss
=> :reader

>> boss.can? :read, document
=> true

>> boss.can? :destroy, document
=> false

>> user.can? :destroy, document
=> true

Grant reader access to a specific user:

>> user
=> #<User id:42 name:"Bob Frop">

>> document.grant :reader, :user, user.id
=> #<Document::ACL "user:42" => :reader>

>> user.can? :read, document
=> true

Grant reader access to a group:

>> user
=> #<User id:42 groups:['reviewers']>

>> document.grant :reader, :group, 3
=> #<Document::ACL "group:reviewers" => :reader>

>> user.can? :read, document
=> true

>> document.allows? :read, user
=> true

Obtain a collection of Resources accessible by a given Actor (rdoc):

>> Document.accessible_by(user)

Check whether a controller action can be accessed by an user. Your Controller must respond to current_user for this to work. (rdoc)

class DocumentsController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :find_document

  authorize :show, [:document, :read]
  authorize :edit, [:document, :edit]

    def find_document
      @document = Document.find(params[:id])

Running specs

You need a running postgresql 9.4 instance.

Create an user and a database:

$ sudo -u postgres psql

postgres=# CREATE ROLE eaco LOGIN;

postgres=# CREATE DATABASE eaco OWNER eaco ENCODING 'utf8';

postgres=# ^D

Create features/active_record.yml with your database configuration, see features/active_record.example.yml for an example.

Run bundle once. This will install the base bundle.

Run appraisal once. This will install the supported Rails versions and +pg+.

Run rake. This will run the specs and cucumber features and report coverage.

Specs are run against the supported rails versions in turn. If you want to focus on a single release, use appraisal rails-X.Y rake, where X.Y can be 3.2, 4.0, 4.1 or 4.2.


  1. Fork it ( https://github.com/ifad/eaco/fork )
  5. Create a new Pull Request

Denominazione d'Origine Controllata

This software is Made in Italy :it: :smile:.