Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Last Updated: January 10, 2026
Imagine you are building an application with thousands of users. You have regular users, managers, support staff, and administrators. Each group needs different levels of access to different parts of the system.
Without a proper system in place, you end up with a tangled mess of conditional logic scattered throughout your codebase. Every time someone joins, leaves, or changes teams, you have to hunt through the code and update access rules manually.
This is where Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) comes in.
The core idea is simple but powerful: instead of assigning permissions directly to individual users, you create roles that represent job functions, assign permissions to those roles, and then assign roles to users.
A "Support Agent" role might include permissions to view orders and process refunds. When someone joins the support team, you assign them that role, and they instantly get exactly the permissions they need.
In this chapter, we will cover:
- What is RBAC and why do we need it?
- Core components of RBAC
- How RBAC works (step-by-step)
- Different RBAC models
- RBAC vs other access control methods
- Implementation best practices
- Real-world examples