Explanation of Phoenix 1.8 scopes pattern for centralizing user context and permission management for better security and maintainability
The Phoenix team introduced “scopes” in Phoenix 1.8 as a recommended pattern (not a library) to improve security and maintainability by centralizing user context and permission management.
Traditional approach requires passing user-specific parameters (user ID, org ID, etc.) to every context function, which becomes unmanageable as complexity grows.
A scope is a struct containing all user context:
Instead of multiple parameters, pass one scope struct as the first parameter to context functions.
The Phoenix team highly recommends this pattern for any app handling user-specific data, making permission management simpler and more secure as complexity increases.
Perplexity research exploring the differences between CanCan's accessible_by method in Rails and Phoenix Scopes for authorization patterns
