ℹ️ The ACL Plugin is not actively maintained by the CakePHP core team. ℹ️ PR's to fix problems are welcome.

As a modern alternative please check out the Authentication and Authorization plugins.

A plugin for managing ACL in CakePHP applications.

You can install this plugin into your CakePHP application using composer.

The recommended way to install composer packages is:

composer require cakephp/acl

Then in your src/Application.php:

public function bootstrap()
{
    parent::bootstrap();
    $this->addPlugin('Acl');
}

To create the ACL requires tables, run the following Migrations command:

bin/cake migrations migrate -p Acl

Add the Acl behavior to your table so it will automatically create an aco whenever a new record is saved:

public function initialize(array $config)
{
    parent::initialize($config);

    $this->addBehavior('Acl.Acl', ['controlled']);
}

Before you can start using the behavior, you MUST add the parentNode() method to the corresponding Entity file or the AclBehavior will not be able to determine the parent->child relationships. Also make make sure the method returns either null or a parent Model reference.

public function parentNode() {
    return null;
}

If things went well you should now see an entry appearing in the acos database table whenever you save a new record.

Assuming you have PHPUnit installed system wide using one of the methods stated here, you can run the tests for the Acl plugin by doing the following:

1. Copy phpunit.xml.dist to phpunit.xml
2. Add the relevant database credentials to your phpunit.xml if you want to run tests against a non-SQLite datasource.
3. Run phpunit