overview.mdx

title	label	order	desc	keywords
Access Control	Overview	10	Payload makes it simple to define and manage access control. By declaring roles, you can set permissions and restrict what your users can interact with.	overview, access control, permissions, documentation, Content Management System, cms, headless, javascript, node, react, express

Access control within Payload is extremely powerful while remaining easy and intuitive to manage. Declaring who should have access to what documents is no more complex than writing a simple JavaScript function that either returns a boolean or a query constraint to restrict which documents users can interact with.

Example use cases:

• Allowing anyone read access to all Posts
• Only allowing public access to Posts where a status field is equal to published
• Giving only Users with a role field equal to admin the ability to delete Page(s)
• Allowing anyone to create ContactSubmissions, but only logged in users to read, update or delete them
• Restricting a User to only be able to see their own Order(s), but no others
• Allowing Users that belong to a certain Organization to access only that Organization's Resources

Default Settings

By default, all Collections and Globals require that a user is logged in to be able to interact in any way. The default Access Control function evaluates the user from the Express req and returns true if a user is logged in, and false if not.

Default Access function:

const defaultPayloadAccess = ({ req: { user } }) => {
  // Return `true` if a user is found
  // and `false` if it is undefined or null
  return Boolean(user);
}

Note:
In the Local API, all Access Control functions are skipped by default, allowing your server to do whatever it needs. But, you can opt back in by setting the option overrideAccess to false.

Access Control Types

You can manage access within Payload on three different levels:

• Collections
• Fields
• Globals

When Access Control is Executed

Note:
Access control functions are utilized in two places. It's important to understand how and when your access control is executed.

As you execute operations

When you perform Payload operations like create, read, update, and delete, your access control functions will be executed before any changes or operations are completed.

Within the Admin UI

The Payload Admin UI responds dynamically to the access control that you define. For example, if you restrict editing a ExampleCollection to only users that feature a role of admin, the Payload Admin UI will hide the ExampleCollection from the Admin UI entirely. This is super powerful and allows you to control who can do what with your Admin UI.

To accomplish this, Payload ships with an Access operation, which is executed when a user logs into the Admin UI. Payload will execute each one of your access control functions, across all collections, globals, and fields, at the top level and return a response that contains a reflection of what the currently authenticated user can do with your application.

Argument Availability

Important:
When your access control functions are executed via the access operation, the id and data arguments will be undefined, because Payload is executing your functions without referencing a specific document.

If you use id or data within your access control functions, make sure to check that they are defined first. If they are not, then you can assume that your access control is being executed via the access operation, to determine solely what the user can do within the Admin UI.