Namespaces

Action Policy can lookup policies with respect to the current execution namespace (i.e., authorization class module).

Consider an example:

module Admin
  class UsersController < ApplicationController
    def index
      # uses Admin::UserPolicy if any, otherwise fallbacks to UserPolicy
      authorize!
    end
  end
end

Module nesting is also supported:

module Admin
  module Client
    class UsersController < ApplicationController
      def index
        # lookup for Admin::Client::UserPolicy -> Admin::UserPolicy -> UserPolicy
        authorize!
      end
    end
  end
end

NOTE: to support namespaced lookup for non-inferrable resources, you should specify policy_name at a class level (instead of policy_class, which doesn't take namespaces into account):

class Guest < User
  def self.policy_name
    "UserPolicy"
  end
end

NOTE: by default, we use class's name as a policy name; so, for namespaced resources, the namespace part is also included:

class Admin
  class User
  end
end

# search for Admin::UserPolicy, but not for UserPolicy
authorize! Admin::User.new

You can access the current authorization namespace through authorization_namespace method.

You can also define your own namespacing logic by overriding authorization_namespace:

def authorization_namespace
  return ::Admin if current_user.admin?
  return ::Staff if current_user.staff?
  # fallback to current namespace
  super
end

NOTE: namespace support is an extension for ActionPolicy::Behaviour and could be included with ActionPolicy::Behaviours::Namespaced (included into Rails controllers and channel integrations by default).

Namespace resolution cache

We cache namespaced policy resolution for better performance (it could affect performance when we look up a policy from a deeply nested module context, see the benchmark).

It could be disabled by setting ActionPolicy::LookupChain.namespace_cache_enabled = false. It's enabled by default unless RACK_ENV env var is specified and is not equal to "production" (e.g. when RACK_ENV=test the cache is disabled).

When using Rails it's enabled only in production mode but could be configured through setting the config.action_policy.namespace_cache_enabled parameter.