PyLink/docs/technical/permissions-api.md

The Permissions API

Permissions were introduced in PyLink 1.0 as a way for plugins to manage command access, replacing the old irc.checkAuthenticated(). The permissions system in PyLink is fairly simple, globally assigning a list of permissions to each hostmask/exttarget.

Permissions conventionally take the format pluginname.commandname.optional_extra_portion(s), and support globs† in matching. Permission nodes are case-insensitive and casemapping aware, but are defined as being all lowercase for consistency.

The permissions module is available as pylinkirc.coremods.permissions. Usually, plugins import it this format:

from pylinkirc.coremods import permissions

† The globbing used by the permissions module is just generic IRC-style globbing. For example, anyone with *, perm.*, perm.?, *.1, etc. in their permissions list will be allowed to use a command checking for a permission named perm.1.

Checking for permissions

Individual functions check for permissions using the permissions.checkPermissions(irc, source, ['perm.1', 'perm.2']) function, where the last argument is an OR’ed list of permissions matched against a list of permission string globs that a user may have. If the user has any of the permissions in the permission list, they will be allowed to call the command. This function returns True when a permission check passes, and raises utils.NotAuthorizedError when a check fails, automatically aborting the execution of the command function.

utils.NotAuthorizedError can be treated like any other exception, so it’s possible to wrap it around try: / except: for more complex access checking (example in the Automode plugin).

Assigning default permissions

Plugins are also allowed to assign default permissions to their commands, though this should be used sparingly to ensure maximum configurability (explicitly removing permissions isn’t supported yet). Default permissions are specified as a dict mapping targets to permission lists.

Example of this in Automode:

# The default set of Automode permissions.
default_permissions = {"$ircop": ['automode.manage.relay_owned', 'automode.sync.relay_owned',
                                  'automode.list']}

Default permissions are registered in a plugin’s main() function via permissions.addDefaultPermissions(default_permissions_dict), and should always be erased on die() through permissions.removeDefaultPermissions(default_permissions_dict).