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Migrating policies from 0.5 to 0.6

0.6 release makes Ory Access Control Policy DSL modeled after AWS IAM Policies obsolete. This guide will help you to rewrite your policies in to relation-tuples. You can read The Evolution of Ory Keto: A Global Scale Authorization System blogpost to understand a benefits of 0.6 release

Legacy rules example​

The policy below allows Alice and Bob to create/read/modify/delete blog_posts:my-first-blog-post, blog_posts:2, and blog_posts:3.

{
  "subjects": ["alice", "bob"],
  "resources": [
    "blog_posts:my-first-blog-post",
    "blog_posts:2",
    "blog_posts:3"
  ],
  "actions": ["delete", "create", "read", "modify"],
  "effect": "allow"
}

Rewriting it to relation tuples​

According to the example above we need to create required namespace and relation tuple

General mapping from old to new policies

  • Subjects -> Subject IDs or Subject Sets
  • Resources -> Objects scoped by namespaces
  • Actions -> Relations
  • Effect -> Became obsolete or can be considered as Relations

We need to have blog_posts namespace for our example. Let's add the following content to keto.yml configuration file. You can find a good template here.

namespaces:
  - id: 0
    name: blog_posts

serve:
  read:
    host: 0.0.0.0
    port: 4466
  write:
    host: 0.0.0.0
    port: 4467

Alice Relation Tuples​

Let's create an alice_policies file with the following content, which adds exactly the same permissions to Alice as the previous example

blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#read@alice
blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#modify@alice
blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#delete@alice
blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#create@alice
blog_posts:2#read@alice
blog_posts:2#modify@alice
blog_posts:2#delete@alice
blog_posts:2#create@alice
blog_posts:3#read@alice
blog_posts:3#modify@alice
blog_posts:3#delete@alice
blog_posts:3#create@alice

You can create a similar bob_policies file with the following permissions

blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#read@bob
blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#modify@bob
blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#delete@bob
blog_posts:my-first-blog-post#create@bob
blog_posts:2#read@bob
blog_posts:2#modify@bob
blog_posts:2#delete@bob
blog_posts:2#create@bob
blog_posts:3#read@bob
blog_posts:3#modify@bob
blog_posts:3#delete@bob
blog_posts:3#create@bob

Creating Relation Tuples using the CLI​

This example uses the Ory Keto CLI to create the relation tuple using the write API

keto relation-tuple parse alice_policies --format json | \
  keto relation-tuple create - >/dev/null \
  && echo "Successfully created tuple" \
  || echo "Encountered error"

Bob

keto relation-tuple parse bob_policies --format json | \
  keto relation-tuple create - >/dev/null \
  && echo "Successfully created tuple" \
  || echo "Encountered error"

Now, we can use the check-API to verify that alice is allowed to read the my-first-blog-post:

keto check alice read blog_posts my-first-blog-post
Allowed

What about Bob?

keto check bob read blog_posts my-first-blog-post
Allowed

What about John?

keto check john read blog_posts my-first-blog-post
Denied

Next steps​