Permissions

Some people in your app may do more than others — an owner can delete a booking, a guest cannot. This screen shows every such distinction your app knows how to make, and lets you bundle them into roles you can hand out.

Two tabs, Scopes and Roles. The Scopes tab lists permissions like "entry:write" with a state of "declared"; the Roles tab lists roles with a description and the count of permissions each one carries.

Two tabs, two jobs

Scopes is the vocabulary. Every individual permission your app checks for, in one list. You cannot add to it here — each one comes from the app itself, which is the point: a permission that is not really checked anywhere should not be grantable.

A permission marked stale is one the list still remembers but the app no longer checks. It is safe to stop granting.

Roles is where you do the work. A role is a named bundle — "billing admin", "support" — and granting someone a role grants everything in it. You create roles here, describe what each is for, and tick the permissions it carries.

Why roles instead of permissions

You can give a person a permission directly, and the screen shows those separately as direct grants. Mostly you should not. A role is a decision you make once and reuse; a pile of direct grants is a decision you have to reconstruct every time someone asks why a person can do something.

When you open a person, you see both: the roles they hold, the permissions granted to them directly, and the combined result. A permission arriving through a role is shown ticked and locked — change it on the role, and everyone holding that role changes with it.

Creating a role is the moment to write its description. The field locks afterwards, and a role called "ops-2" with nothing beside it is a question nobody can answer six months later.

If the screen says you cannot see this

Reading this list is itself permission-gated. The message tells you which permission you are missing and that an administrator has to grant you a role carrying it — it does not mean anything is broken.

Where to go next

• Ways to sign in — how people get in, before the question of what they may do.
• Users — the actual people, and handing them roles.
• Feature flags — what is switched on, which is a separate question.