In this episode, we’re diving into how to securely authorize actions in a RESTful setup, specifically focusing on making sure users can only perform actions on their own resources. Up until now, anyone could technically craft a request to do something like creating an order on behalf of any user—obviously not what we want!
We start by demonstrating the problem: by tweaking the user ID in the URL, it's possible to create an order for a different user—even if you're logged in as someone else. This clearly needs fixing.
To solve this, we implement an authorize
method in our action. At first, we just make it return false
to check that unauthorized actions are blocked (which results in a nice 403
error page). Then, we enhance the method to compare the currently authenticated user to the user referenced in the URL. If they match, we allow the action; if not, it's blocked.
We wrap up by confirming that users can now only create orders for themselves, not others. This secures our resource endpoints and demonstrates a clean pattern for adding simple authorization checks to your application actions.