PyLink/docs/technical/permissions-api.md

The Permissions API

Permissions were introduced in PyLink 1.0 as a better (but optional) way for plugins to manage access to commands. The permissions system in PyLink is fairly simple, globally assigning a list of permissions to each hostmask/exttarget.

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

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 (i.e. users only need one out of all of them). 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.

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).