Permissions

User and Roles
Spree by default comes with admin and user roles. You can create more roles in the Admin Panel UI or rails console / seed, eg.:
Spree::Role.find_or_create_by(name: 'customer_service')
Same with assigning a role, you can do it in the Admin Panel or from the console:
Spree.user_class.find_by(email: '[email protected]').spree_roles << Spree::Role.find_or_create_by(name: 'customer_service')
Ability class
For authorization Spree uses CanCanCan library. The main ability class by default is Spree::Ability.
Adding custom permissions
Let's assume you would like to add a new Role customer_service with some limited access to Admin Panel (only Orders section).
Create a new file called app/models/my_project/customer_service_ability.rb
module MyProject
  class CustomerServiceAbility
    include CanCan::Ability
​
    def initialize(user)
      if user.respond_to?(:has_spree_role?) && user.has_spree_role?('customer_service')
        can :manage, ::Spree::Order
      end
    end
  end
end
Please familiarize yourself with CanCanCan syntax to understand can/cannot methods more.
Now we need to inform Spree to use this ability, create another file app/models/my_project/spree/ability_decorator.rb with contents:
module MyProject
  module Spree
    module AbilityDecorator
      def abilities_to_register
        [CustomerServiceAbility]
      end
    end
  end
end
​
::Spree::Ability.prepend(MyProject::Spree::AbilityDecorator)
Replacing all permissions
As we've mentioned earlier, Spree uses the main Ability class. You can change that to use your own custom Ability class via Dependencies in Spree initializer (config/initializers/spree.rb), eg.
Spree::Dependencies.ability_class = 'MyProject::Ability'
Now, let's define that new class in app/models/my_project/ability.rb
module MyProject
  class Ability < ::Spree::Ability
    def initialize(user)
      alias_cancan_delete_action
​
      user ||= Spree.user_class.new
​
      if user.respond_to?(:has_spree_role?) && user.has_spree_role?('admin')
        apply_admin_permissions(user)
        # add some more permissions here for the admin role
      else 
        if user.respond_to?(:has_spree_role?) && user.has_spree_role?(:customer_service)
          apply_customer_service_permissions(user)
        end
​
        apply_user_permissions(user)
      end
​
      protect_admin_role
    end
​
    protected
​
    def apply_customer_service_permissions(user)
      can :manage, ::Spree::Order
    end
  end
end
After restarting the rails server you observe new permissions being recognized in the application.
Further permission changes should be automatically picked up in development and should not require application restarts.

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Outline

User and Roles

Ability class

Adding custom permissions

Replacing all permissions