In this episode, we dive into the basics of authorization in Laravel Livewire, especially focusing on why it's super important to protect actions like deleting a book. We start by discussing how, even though a user might not actually enter the ID of the book to be deleted, anything sent from the client can be tampered with, so we can't blindly trust it. Without proper checks, someone could potentially delete another user's book—definitely not what we want!
To prevent this, we set up a policy in Laravel that governs who can perform certain actions on a "Book". You’ll see how easy it is to create a BookPolicy, define a method for deleting, and register it in the AuthServiceProvider. The check is simple: only the book's owner is allowed to delete it.
Next, we wire this up in our Livewire component. Before deleting a book, we fetch it by its ID, then run the authorize
method to ensure the current user has permission to proceed. As a quick demo, we try deleting a book with another user (by manipulating things on the client side) and—thanks to our policy—Livewire throws an unauthorized error and the database record remains untouched.
By the end of this episode, you'll see just how important (and easy) it is to authorize actions like deletions, and you’ll know exactly where to put these checks in your own Livewire apps.