Access Control: authorization for your PHP applications

Access Control decides whether a requester is allowed to perform an action on a subject.

It is authorization on its own. Voters, combining algorithms, access policies declared as attributes, and decisions that say why they were reached: none of it needs an authentication stack to exist. There is no user, no token and no firewall in the vocabulary, and a requester is whatever your application says it is.

$decision = $accessControlManager->decide(new AccessRequest($requester, 'EDIT', $post));

if (! $decision->isGranted()) {
    throw new AccessDeniedException($decision->reason);
}

The same question, asked from a controller of a Symfony application:

#[AccessPolicy('EDIT', new Argument('post'))]
public function edit(Post $post): Response
{
    // ...
}

Two packages

Package	What it is
spomky-labs/access-control-lib	The library, usable in any PHP application
spomky-labs/access-control-bundle	The integration into the Symfony full-stack framework

Both are read-only subtree splits of access-control-framework, where issues and pull requests belong.

Coming from Symfony Security

Installing the bundle changes nothing you can see. Your voters keep being consulted, #[IsGranted] is read, is_granted() answers in your templates, and the rules of your security.yaml are enforced. What changed is who decides. Moving to this component's own vocabulary is a second, separate migration you make at your own pace, and The Two Migrations explains why confusing the two would cost you the adoption.

Where to start

• What is Access Control? if you want the shape of the thing first.
• Installation if you want to try it now.
• Vocabulary if a word here already means something else to you. It probably does: subject is the resource, not the actor.