Permissions Rbac

Permissions — three layers, and one rule people get wrong

Read docs/permissions.md for the model and docs/reference/permissions.md for the generated catalog. .claude/rules/exceptions-security.md has the code shapes. This file is what to do and what not to.

Permissions are defined in code; roles are composed from them. Call sites check permissions, never role names, so adding or re-shaping a role never means editing an endpoint.

The rule that gets broken

require(...) gates belong on collection routes, not per-resource ones.

A role gate cannot see the grants on a row. Put one on a per-resource route and it refuses a Viewer holding an explicit edit grant before resolve_access ever widens their access — which directly contradicts the platform's own promise that a grant widens what a role allows and never narrows it.

tests/api/test_platform_routes.py enforces both halves. If it fails after you added a gate, the gate is the bug.

The two calls

pythonCopy code
# Collection route — a permission, as a route dependency.
@router.post("", dependencies=[Depends(require(Perm.AGENTS_EDIT))])
async def create_agent(ctx: Auth, service: AgentSvc) -> Any: ...

# One row — in the service, never as a route gate.
if not await resolve_access(self.db, ctx, agent, Perm.AGENTS_EDIT, resource_type=AGENT):
    raise AuthorizationError(message="...")

Listings need the third call, or shared rows silently vanish:

pythonCopy code
extra = await visible_resource_ids(db, ctx, resource_type=AGENT, perm=Perm.AGENTS_VIEW)
# None means the role already reaches everything — skip the grant lookup.
# An empty list is NOT the same as None; a context with no subject gets [].

The three layers

1. users.is_app_admin — the deployment superadmin. CurrentAppAdmin. uv run agenticos cmd create-app-admin <email> [--revoke].
2. The organization role — owner, admin, builder, operator, member, viewer. Composed from permissions in app/core/permissions.py.
3. Visibility and grants — a grant on one row, to a person or to a group (docs/directory.md#groups). effective = max(role scope, grant on this resource).

Capability scopes (knowledge:read, web:read, code:execute) are a separate axis, not a fourth layer: they are what an organization allows its agents to do, checked when an agent is assembled rather than per request. See the agent-capability skill.

Resource permissions carry a Scope: none, own, shared, all. It answers the question a role cannot — not "may this role touch agents?" but which agents.

What does not exist

UserRole, User.has_role(), RoleChecker, CurrentAdmin, CurrentSuperuser. The users.role column was dropped before the migration chain was squashed, so there is no revision to point at: 0001_baseline simply creates users without it. Do not reintroduce any of them, and do not add --role to a CLI command. Authority inside an organization is a membership row plus this catalog.

Only two user aliases exist: CurrentUser and CurrentAppAdmin. Anything org-scoped goes through Auth (AuthContext) plus a permission.

Adding a permission

1. Add to Perm in app/core/permissions.py.
2. Add it to every role in the matrix that should have it — with a Scope if it is a resource permission.
3. Gate the collection routes; hand per-resource decisions to a service.
4. Test the refusal, and test it cross-tenant. Most of this platform's value is in what it refuses.
5. The frontend reads the effective permission set — check what it hides, and add an integration test that a button is actually gone (see the frontend-feature and e2e-tests skills).

Always test

• Tenant isolation — unreachable from another organization including when the caller owns the row.
• A grant widening, not promoting — a Viewer with an edit grant on one agent edits that agent and nothing else.
• A context with no subject — API key, embed session, channel run. See docs/permissions.md#contexts-with-no-subject.

Depth

references/catalog.md — the permission list, the role matrix, and how resolve_access decides.