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ACL Shell

The AclShell is useful for managing and inspecting your Acl databases records. It’s often more convenient than adding one time modifications to your controllers.

Most acl shell subcommands involve referencing aco/aro nodes. As there are two ‘forms’ of these nodes, there is two notations in the shell:

# A Model + foreign_key reference
./Console/cake acl view aro Model.1

# An alias path reference
./Console/cake acl view aco root/controllers

Using a . indicates that you are going to use a bound record style reference while using a / indicates an alias path.

Installing the database tables

Before using the database ACL you’ll need to setup the tables. You can do that using:

./Console/cake acl initdb

Create and delete nodes

You can use the create and delete subcommands to create and delete nodes:

./Console/cake acl create aco controllers Posts
./Console/cake acl create aco Posts index

Would create an aco record using an alias path. You could do the following as well:

./Console/cake acl create aro Group.1

To create an aro node for the Group id = 1.

Grant and deny access

Use the grant command to grant ACL permissions. Once executed, the ARO specified (and its children, if any) will have ALLOW access to the specified ACO action (and the ACO’s children, if any):

./Console/cake acl grant Group.1 controllers/Posts

The above would grant all privileges. You could grant only the read privilege using the following:

./Console/cake acl grant Group.1 controllers/Posts read

Denying permission works in the exact same way. The only difference is you switch ‘deny’ in for ‘grant’.

Check permissions

Use this command to check ACL permissions.

./Console/cake acl check Group.1 controllers/Posts read

The output will either be allowed or not allowed.

View the node trees

The view command will return the ARO or ACO tree. The optional node parameter allows you to return only a portion of the requested tree:

./Console/cake acl view