Turnstile is a simple authorization module. With turnstile you'll be able to define rules for each role to access your controllers and views.

= Roles, Rules and Privileges

You can define all roles, all rules and all privileges in the config file, placed in config/initializers/turnstile.rb

= Privileges

privilege :read do allows_to :show, :index denies_to :destroy, :create end

privilege :manage do allows_to :create, :new allows_to :destroy end

= Rules to Roles

role :reader do can :read => :posts can :read => :comments end

role :admin do inherits :reader can :manage => :posts end

= The Default Role

You need to set a role to be used when the current user has no role

default_is :reader

An example of config file can be found in config/initializers/turnstile.rb in this repo.

= The User Model

So far it is hardcoded, so you need a string column called user_role

For example, using Active Record, in your migration, put: t.string :user_role

or for Mongoid: field :user_role

and be sure to have a method that returns the current user using

current_user

Authorization makes more sense when used with authentication, the most authentication libs have a method called current_user that returns the current user. dah =/ So you probably won't need to do that, but if you need to, Turnstile also can verify user permission trough...

Thread.current['current_user'] = User...

So set it and have fun, otherwise, the default role will always be set.

= Controllers For each controller that you want to monitorate just call:

before_filter :verify_role_permissions!

= Views To access the current role in your views use

current_role

Then for example, you can check its permissions with

current_role.is_allowed_to? :create, :posts

= Demonstration There is something that i call blongloid !lol! in my repos. Blongoid is a blog prototype using Rails 3, Mongoid, Devise and Turnstile.

You can check there some using of Turnstile.