Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to manage user permissions and restrict access to resources.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a common and effective authorization strategy. Once a user has been authenticated (we know who they are), RBAC is used to determine what they are allowed to do within the application. The core idea is to assign permissions to specific roles rather than directly to individual users. Users are then assigned one or more of these roles. For example, in a content management system, you might define several roles: 'viewer', 'editor', and 'admin'. The 'viewer' role would have permission to read articles. The 'editor' role would have permission to read, create, and update articles. The 'admin' role would have all those permissions, plus the permission to delete articles and manage users. When a new user signs up, they might be assigned the 'viewer' role by default. A manager could later promote them to an 'editor'. This approach greatly simplifies permission management. If you need to change the permissions for a certain type of user, you only need to modify the permissions for the role, and the change will instantly apply to all users assigned to that role. In your backend code, you would implement this by creating middleware that checks the role of the authenticated user (which might be stored in their session or JWT) against the permissions required for a specific API endpoint. If the user's role has the necessary permissions, the request proceeds; otherwise, a '403 Forbidden' error is returned.