Welcome to Permission Systems That Scale

Welcome! In this workshop, you'll learn how to build robust, maintainable permission systems for real-world web applications. By the end, you'll understand the trade-offs between different authorization approaches and know how to implement them from scratch.

What You'll Learn

• How to implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with clean, type-safe code
• How to build Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for complex, dynamic permissions
• How popular libraries like CASL and Casbin handle permissions
• How to structure permission logic so it's easy to maintain and extend

What You'll Build

Throughout this workshop, we'll progressively enhance a document management application. Starting with basic permission checks scattered throughout the codebase, we'll refactor and upgrade the system through multiple iterations:

1. Basic Permissions → Inline checks with simple role comparisons
2. Structured RBAC → Centralized role-permission mappings
3. Full ABAC → Dynamic rules based on user attributes, resource properties, and context
4. Library Integration → Migrating to CASL for production-ready permissions

Each upgrade will demonstrate the strengths and limitations of different approaches, helping you choose the right tool for your specific needs.

Workshop Format

This is a hands-on, code-along workshop. We'll spend most of our time:

• Live coding: Building and refactoring permission systems together
• Discussing trade-offs: Understanding when to use each approach
• Exploring edge cases: Handling real-world permission scenarios