Previously the Zend Framework blog posted a tutorial showed you how to authenticate a user with middleware in a Zend Expressive application. In this latest post in the series they move on to the next step: authorization.

In a previous post, we demonstrated how to authenticate a middleware application in PHP. In this post we will continue the discussion, showing how to manage authorizations.

We will start from an authenticated user and demonstrate how to allow or disable actions for specific users. We will collect users by groups and we will use a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system to manage the authorizations.

To implement RBAC, we will consume zendframework/zend-permissions-rbac.

They start by pulling in the Zend Expressive tooling support and creating the Permission module. The tutorial then gets into the basics of using a role-based access control system and the roles they're going to define: admin, editor and contributor (as well as what each can do). The roles are then defined in a configuration file and briefly explained. Next is the creation of the middleware to authorize the user and its action in the application, performing a check against the roles of the user on the requirements of the action. There's also an example of setting up role inheritance and how to configure the resulting route to fire off the authorization handling.