Authorization

When Nova is accessed only by you or your development team, you may not need additional authorization before Nova handles incoming requests. However, if you provide access to Nova to your clients or a large team of developers, you may wish to authorize certain requests. For example, perhaps only administrators may delete records. Thankfully, Nova takes a simple approach to authorization that leverages many of the Laravel features you are already familiar with.

​

Policies

To limit which users may view, create, update, or delete resources, Nova leverages Laravel’s authorization policies. Policies are simple PHP classes that organize authorization logic for a particular model or resource. For example, if your application is a blog, you may have a Post model and a corresponding PostPolicy within your application.

When manipulating a resource within Nova, Nova will automatically attempt to find a corresponding policy for the model. If Nova detects a policy has been registered for the model, it will automatically check that policy’s relevant authorization methods before performing their respective actions, such as:

• viewAny
• view
• create
• update
• replicate
• delete
• restore
• forceDelete

No additional configuration is required! So, for example, to determine which users are allowed to update a Post model, you simply need to define an update method on the model’s corresponding policy class:

namespace App\Policies;

use App\Models\User;
use App\Models\Post;
use Illuminate\Auth\Access\HandlesAuthorization;

class PostPolicy
{
    use HandlesAuthorization;

    /**
     * Determine whether the user can update the post.
     *
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function update(User $user, Post $post)
    {
        return $user->type == 'editor';
    }
}

​

Undefined Policy Methods

If a policy exists but is missing a method for a particular action, Nova will use the following default permission for each actions:

So, if you have defined a policy, don’t forget to define all of its relevant authorization methods so that the authorization rules for a given resource are explicit.

​

Hiding Entire Resources

If you would like to hide an entire Nova resource from a subset of your dashboard’s users, you may define a viewAny method on the model’s policy class. If no viewAny method is defined for a given policy, Nova will assume that the user can view the resource:

use App\Models\User;

// ...

/**
 * Determine whether the user can view any posts.
 *
 * @return mixed
 */
public function viewAny(User $user)
{
    return in_array('view-posts', $user->permissions);
}

​

When Nova & Application Authorization Logic Differs

If you need to authorize actions differently when a request is initiated from within Nova versus your primary application, you may utilize Nova’s whenServing method within your policy. This method allows you to only execute the given callback if the request is a Nova request. An additional callback may be provided that will be executed for non-Nova requests:

use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;
use Laravel\Nova\Nova;

// ... 

/**
 * Determine whether the user can view any posts.
 *
 * @return mixed
 */
public function viewAny(User $user)
{
    return Nova::whenServing(function (NovaRequest $request) use ($user) {
        return in_array('nova:view-posts', $user->permissions);
    }, function (Request $request) use ($user) {
        return in_array('view-posts', $user->permissions);
    });
}

​

Using Separate Policy Classes for Nova Resources

You may also create a policy specifically for Nova resources instead of relying on the Eloquent model’s application level policy. To get started, generate a new Nova policy via the nova:policy command:

php artisan nova:policy PostPolicy --resource=Post

The nova:policy command above will create a new policy class as App\Nova\Policies\PostPolicy. In addition, the generated policy will authorize against App\Nova\Post instead of App\Models\Post. To register the policy with your Nova resource, you should specify the policy within the resource’s $policy property:

namespace App\Nova;

class Post extends Resource
{
    /**
     * The policy the resource corresponds to.
     *
     * @var class-string
     */
    public static $policy = Policies\PostPolicy::class;
}

​

Relationships

We have already learned how to authorize the typical view, create, update, and delete actions, but what about relationship interactions? For example, if you are building a podcasting application, perhaps you would like to specify that only certain Nova users may add comments to podcasts. Again, Nova makes this simple by leveraging Laravel’s policies.

When working with relationships, Nova uses a simple policy method naming convention. To illustrate this convention, lets assume your application has Podcast resources and Comment resources. If you would like to authorize which users can add comments to a podcast, you should define an addComment method on your podcast model’s policy class:

use App\Models\User;
use App\Models\Podcast;

// ...

/**
 * Determine whether the user can add a comment to the podcast.
 *
 * @return mixed
 */
public function addComment(User $user, Podcast $podcast)
{
    return true;
}

As you can see, Nova uses a simple add{Model} policy method naming convention for authorizing relationship actions.

​

Authorizing Attaching / Detaching

For many-to-many relationships, Nova uses a similar naming convention. However, instead of add{Model}, you should use an attach{Model} / detach{Model} naming convention. For example, imagine a Podcast model has a many-to-many relationship with the Tag model. If you would like to authorize which users can attach “tags” to a podcast, you may add an attachTag method to your podcast policy. In addition, you will likely want to define the inverse attachPodcast on the tag policy:

use App\Models\Podcast;
use App\Models\Tag;
use App\Models\User;

// ... 

/**
 * Determine whether the user can attach a tag to a podcast.
 *
 * @return mixed
 */
public function attachTag(User $user, Podcast $podcast, Tag $tag)
{
    return true;
}

/**
 * Determine whether the user can detach a tag from a podcast.
 *
 * @return mixed
 */
public function detachTag(User $user, Podcast $podcast, Tag $tag)
{
    return true;
}

In the previous examples, we are determining if a user is authorized to attach one model to another. If certain types of users are never allowed to attach a given type of model, you may define a attachAny{Model} method on your policy class. This will prevent the “Attach” button from displaying in the Nova UI entirely:

use App\Models\Podcast;
use App\Models\Tag;
use App\Models\User;

// ... 

/**
 * Determine whether the user can attach any tags to the podcast.
 * 
 * @return mixed
 */
public function attachAnyTag(User $user, Podcast $podcast)
{
    return false;
}

​

Disabling Authorization

If one of your Nova resources’ models has a corresponding policy, but you want to disable Nova authorization for that resource (thus allowing all actions), you may override the authorizable method on the Nova resource:

/**
 * Determine if the given resource is authorizable.
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public static function authorizable()
{
    return false;
}

​

Fields

Sometimes you may want to hide certain fields from a group of users. You may easily accomplish this by chaining the canSee method onto your field definition. The canSee method accepts a closure which should return true or false. The closure will receive the incoming HTTP request:

use Laravel\Nova\Fields\ID;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Text;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Get the fields displayed by the resource.
 *
 * @return array<int, \Laravel\Nova\Fields\Field>
 */
public function fields(NovaRequest $request): array
{
    return [
        ID::make()->sortable(),

        Text::make('Name')
            ->sortable()
            ->canSee(function ($request) {
                return $request->user()->can('viewProfile', $this);
            }),
    ];
}

In the example above, we are using Laravel’s Authorizable trait’s can method on our User model to determine if the authorized user is authorized for the viewProfile action. However, since proxying to authorization policy methods is a common use-case for canSee, you may use the canSeeWhen method to achieve the same behavior. The canSeeWhen method has the same method signature as the Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\Access\Authorizable trait’s can method:

use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Text;

// ...

Text::make('Name')
        ->sortable()
        ->canSeeWhen('viewProfile', $this),

​

Index Filtering

You may notice that returning false from a policy’s view method does not stop a given resource from appearing in the resource index. To filter models from the resource index query, you may override the indexQuery method on the resource’s class.

This method is already defined in your application’s App\Nova\Resource base class; therefore, you may simply copy and paste the method into a specific resource and then modify the query based on how you would like to filter the resource’s index results:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Build an "index" query for the given resource.
 */
public static function indexQuery(NovaRequest $request, Builder $query): Builder 
{
    return $query->where('user_id', $request->user()->id);
}

​

Relatable Filtering

If you would like to filter the queries that are used to populate relationship model selection menus, you may override the relatableQuery method on your resource.

For example, if your application has a Comment resource that belongs to a Podcast resource, Nova will allow you to select the parent Podcast when creating a Comment. To limit the podcasts that are available in that selection menu, you should override the relatableQuery method on your Podcast resource:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Build an "relatable" query for the given resource.
 * 
 * This query determines which instances of the model may be attached to other resources.
 */
public static function relatableQuery(NovaRequest $request, Builder $query): Builder 
{
    return $query->where('user_id', $request->user()->id);
}

​

Dynamic Relatable Methods

You can customize the “relatable” query for individual relationships by using a dynamic, convention based method name that is suffixed with the pluralized name of the model. For example, if your application has a Post resource, in which posts can be tagged, but the Tag resource is associated with different types of models, you may define a relatableTags method to customize the relatable query for this relationship:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Build a "relatable" query for the given resource.
 *
 * This query determines which instances of the model may be attached to other resources.
 */
public static function relatableTags(NovaRequest $request, Builder $query): Builder
{
    return $query->where('type', 'posts');
}

If necessary, you may access the resource and resourceId for the request via the NovaRequest instance that is passed to your method:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Build a "relatable" query for the given resource.
 *
 * This query determines which instances of the model may be attached to other resources.
 */
public static function relatableTags(NovaRequest $request, Builder $query): Builder
{
    $resource = $request->route('resource'); // The resource type...
    $resourceId = $request->resourceId; // The resource ID...

    return $query->where('type', $resource);
}

​

Relationship Types

When a Nova resource depends on another resource via multiple fields, you will often assign the fields different names such as:

use Laravel\Nova\Fields\BelongsTo; 
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\BelongsToMany; 
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\HasMany; 
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Get the fields displayed by the resource.
 *
 * @return array<int, \Laravel\Nova\Fields\Field>
 */
public function fields(NovaRequest $request): array
{
    return [
        BelongsTo::make('Current Team', 'currentTeam', Team::class),
        HasMany::make('Owned Teams', 'ownedTeams', Team::class),
        BelongsToMany::make('Teams', 'teams', Team::class),
    ];
}

In these situations, you should supply a third argument when defining the relationship to specify which Nova resource the relationship should utilize, since Nova may not be able to determine this via convention:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Database\Eloquent\Builder;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\BelongsTo;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\BelongsToMany;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\Field;
use Laravel\Nova\Fields\HasMany;
use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;

// ...

/**
 * Build a "relatable" query for the given resource.
 *
 * This query determines which instances of the model may be attached to other resources.
 */
public static function relatableTeams(
    NovaRequest $request, 
    Builder $query, 
    Field $field
): Builder {
    if ($field instanceof BelongsToMany && $field->attribute === 'teams') {
        // ... 
    } elseif ($field instanceof BelongsTo && $field->attribute === 'currentTeam') {
        // ...
    }

    return $query;
}

​

Scout Filtering

If your application is leveraging the power of Laravel Scout for search, you may also customize the Laravel\Scout\Builder query instance before it is sent to your search provider. To accomplish this, override the scoutQuery method on your resource class:

use Laravel\Nova\Http\Requests\NovaRequest;
use Laravel\Scout\Builder as ScoutBuilder;

// ...

/**
 * Build a Scout search query for the given resource.
 */
public static function scoutQuery(
    NovaRequest $request, 
    ScoutBuilder $query
): ScoutBuilder {
    return $query->where('user_id', $request->user()->id);
}