The Laravel News site has posted an in-depth look at two packages Laravel users can implement to add in role/permission management: Bouncer and Laravel-permission.

Roles and permissions are an important part of many web applications. Laravel historically had a lot of packages for them, and improved the core code as well. So what is the situation on this market today? What packages are the best to use? I’ve picked two.

The post starts off by sharing a few reasons why you might even need these packages with the functionality that Laravel already includes. Most of the reasoning comes from the fact that the framework allows for checks but doesn't provide role/permission management. It then gets into what each of the package provide, how to install them and some example code to put them to use. It also looks at the database structure behind them and how they use that to store the authorization data.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post highlighting a package that can help you enforce roles and permissions in your application, enhancing the existing gates functionality.

Bouncer is an authorization package by Joseph Silber which allows role and ability checks at Laravel’s authorization gate. The package is described as follows: "Bouncer provides a mechanism to handle roles and abilities in Laravel’s ACL. With an expressive and fluent syntax, it stays out of your way as much as possible: use it when you want, ignore it when you don’t."

Bouncer makes it trivial to quickly create roles and abilities with a fluent API that creates them automatically.

The post includes some examples of the library in use, creating roles and abilities with its fluent API and the use of a trait to integrate it into other classes. They also include a bit about how the automatic role creation works and using the functionality in middleware. It also talks about how Bouncer intercepts "can" checks for its own evaluations and how to get all of the abilities for the current user.