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Overview

After deploying your application to production, you may occasionally need to “impersonate” another user of your application in order to debug problems your customers are reporting. Thankfully, Nova includes built-in functionality to handle this exact scenario.

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Enabling Impersonation

To enable user impersonation, add the Laravel\Nova\Auth\Impersonatable trait to your application’s User model:
app/Models/User.php
namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\MustVerifyEmail;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notifiable;
use Laravel\Nova\Auth\Impersonatable;
use Laravel\Sanctum\HasApiTokens;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use HasApiTokens, HasFactory, Impersonatable, Notifiable;

    // ...
}
Once the Impersonatable trait has been added to your application’s User model, an “Impersonate” action will be available via the inline action menu for the corresponding resource:
Impersonation

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Customizing Impersonation Authorization

By default, any user that has permission to view the Nova dashboard can impersonate any other user. However, you may customize who can impersonate other users and what users can be impersonated by defining canImpersonate and canBeImpersonated methods on your application’s Impersonatable model:
app/Models/User.php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Gate;

// ...

/**
 * Determine if the user can impersonate another user.
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public function canImpersonate()
{
    return Gate::forUser($this)->check('viewNova');
}

/**
 * Determine if the user can be impersonated.
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public function canBeImpersonated()
{
    return true;
}

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Inspecting Impersonation State

By resolving an implementation of the Laravel\Nova\Contracts\ImpersonatesUsers interface via Laravel’s service container, you can inspect the current impersonation state of the application:
routes/web.php
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;
use Laravel\Nova\Contracts\ImpersonatesUsers;

Route::get('/impersonation', function (Request $request, ImpersonatesUsers $impersonator) {
    if ($impersonator->impersonating($request)) {
        $impersonator->stopImpersonating($request, Auth::guard(), User::class);
    }
});

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Impersonation Events

By default, you add additional customisation by using available events for Impersonations:
  • Laravel\Nova\Events\StartedImpersonating
  • Laravel\Nova\Events\StoppedImpersonating
For example, you may want to log impersonation events, which you can register listeners for in the boot method of your application’s AppServiceProvider or EventServiceProvider:
app/Providers/EventServiceProvider.php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Event;
use Laravel\Nova\Events\StartedImpersonating;
use Laravel\Nova\Events\StoppedImpersonating;

// ...

/**
 * Bootstrap any application services.
 */
public function boot(): void
{
    parent::boot();

    Event::listen(StartedImpersonating::class, function ($event) {
        logger("User {$event->impersonator->name} started impersonating {$event->impersonated->name}");
    });

    Event::listen(StoppedImpersonating::class, function ($event) {
        logger("User {$event->impersonator->name} stopped impersonating {$event->impersonated->name}");
    });
}