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Symfony 5: The Fast Track

A new book to learn about developing modern Symfony 5 applications.

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  5. How to secure any Service or Method in your Application
WARNING: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 2.2 which is not maintained anymore. Consider upgrading your projects to Symfony 4.3.

How to secure any Service or Method in your Application

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How to secure any Service or Method in your Application

In the security chapter, you can see how to secure a controller by requesting the security.context service from the Service Container and checking the current user's role:

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// ...
use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Exception\AccessDeniedException;

public function helloAction($name)
{
    if (false === $this->get('security.context')->isGranted('ROLE_ADMIN')) {
        throw new AccessDeniedException();
    }

    // ...
}

You can also secure any service in a similar way by injecting the security.context service into it. For a general introduction to injecting dependencies into services see the Service Container chapter of the book. For example, suppose you have a NewsletterManager class that sends out emails and you want to restrict its use to only users who have some ROLE_NEWSLETTER_ADMIN role. Before you add security, the class looks something like this:

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// src/Acme/HelloBundle/Newsletter/NewsletterManager.php
namespace Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter;

class NewsletterManager
{

    public function sendNewsletter()
    {
        // ... where you actually do the work
    }

    // ...
}

Your goal is to check the user's role when the sendNewsletter() method is called. The first step towards this is to inject the security.context service into the object. Since it won't make sense not to perform the security check, this is an ideal candidate for constructor injection, which guarantees that the security context object will be available inside the NewsletterManager class:

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namespace Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter;

use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\SecurityContextInterface;

class NewsletterManager
{
    protected $securityContext;

    public function __construct(SecurityContextInterface $securityContext)
    {
        $this->securityContext = $securityContext;
    }

    // ...
}

Then in your service configuration, you can inject the service:

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    # src/Acme/HelloBundle/Resources/config/services.yml
parameters:
    newsletter_manager.class: Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager

services:
    newsletter_manager:
        class:     "%newsletter_manager.class%"
        arguments: ["@security.context"]
  • XML
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    <!-- src/Acme/HelloBundle/Resources/config/services.xml -->
<parameters>
    <parameter key="newsletter_manager.class">Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager</parameter>
</parameters>

<services>
    <service id="newsletter_manager" class="%newsletter_manager.class%">
        <argument type="service" id="security.context"/>
    </service>
</services>
  • PHP
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    // src/Acme/HelloBundle/Resources/config/services.php
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Definition;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Reference;

$container->setParameter('newsletter_manager.class', 'Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter\NewsletterManager');

$container->setDefinition('newsletter_manager', new Definition(
    '%newsletter_manager.class%',
    array(new Reference('security.context'))
));

The injected service can then be used to perform the security check when the sendNewsletter() method is called:

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namespace Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter;

use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Exception\AccessDeniedException;
use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\SecurityContextInterface;
// ...

class NewsletterManager
{
    protected $securityContext;

    public function __construct(SecurityContextInterface $securityContext)
    {
        $this->securityContext = $securityContext;
    }

    public function sendNewsletter()
    {
        if (false === $this->securityContext->isGranted('ROLE_NEWSLETTER_ADMIN')) {
            throw new AccessDeniedException();
        }

        // ...
    }

    // ...
}

If the current user does not have the ROLE_NEWSLETTER_ADMIN, they will be prompted to log in.

Securing Methods Using Annotations

You can also secure method calls in any service with annotations by using the optional JMSSecurityExtraBundle bundle. This bundle is included in the Symfony2 Standard Distribution.

To enable the annotations functionality, tag the service you want to secure with the security.secure_service tag (you can also automatically enable this functionality for all services, see the sidebar below):

  • YAML
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    # src/Acme/HelloBundle/Resources/config/services.yml
# ...

services:
    newsletter_manager:
        # ...
        tags:
            -  { name: security.secure_service }
  • XML
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    <!-- src/Acme/HelloBundle/Resources/config/services.xml -->
<!-- ... -->

<services>
    <service id="newsletter_manager" class="%newsletter_manager.class%">
        <!-- ... -->
        <tag name="security.secure_service" />
    </service>
</services>
  • PHP
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    // src/Acme/HelloBundle/Resources/config/services.php
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Definition;
use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Reference;

$definition = new Definition(
    '%newsletter_manager.class%',
    array(new Reference('security.context'))
));
$definition->addTag('security.secure_service');
$container->setDefinition('newsletter_manager', $definition);

You can then achieve the same results as above using an annotation:

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namespace Acme\HelloBundle\Newsletter;

use JMS\SecurityExtraBundle\Annotation\Secure;
// ...

class NewsletterManager
{

    /**
     * @Secure(roles="ROLE_NEWSLETTER_ADMIN")
     */
    public function sendNewsletter()
    {
        // ...
    }

    // ...
}

Note

The annotations work because a proxy class is created for your class which performs the security checks. This means that, whilst you can use annotations on public and protected methods, you cannot use them with private methods or methods marked final.

The JMSSecurityExtraBundle also allows you to secure the parameters and return values of methods. For more information, see the JMSSecurityExtraBundle documentation.

Activating the Annotations Functionality for all Services

When securing the method of a service (as shown above), you can either tag each service individually, or activate the functionality for all services at once. To do so, set the secure_all_services configuration option to true:

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    # app/config/config.yml
jms_security_extra:
    # ...
    secure_all_services: true
  • XML
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    <?xml version="1.0" ?>

<container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:acme_hello="http://www.example.com/symfony/schema/"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.example.com/symfony/schema/ http://www.example.com/symfony/schema/hello-1.0.xsd">

    <!-- app/config/config.xml -->

    <jms_security_extra secure_controllers="true" secure_all_services="true" />

</srv:container>
  • PHP
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    // app/config/config.php
$container->loadFromExtension('jms_security_extra', array(
    // ...

    'secure_all_services' => true,
));

The disadvantage of this method is that, if activated, the initial page load may be very slow depending on how many services you have defined.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.