varvet/pundit

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

8522 stars · 641 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Pundit is a Ruby gem that provides minimal authorization for Rails applications using plain Ruby policy classes and object-oriented design. It maps controller actions to policy query methods to decide what a user is permitted to do.

Use cases

• authorize user actions in a rails app
• build role-based access control with plain ruby classes
• restrict which records users can update or delete
• scope database queries based on user permissions
• add per-model policy classes to a web application
• replace complex authorization gems with simple OO policies

When to choose

• you use Rails or Rack-based Ruby apps and want lightweight, transparent authorization
• you prefer plain Ruby objects over DSL-based authorization rules
• you want policy logic that is easy to unit test
• your authorization needs are straightforward and model-centric

When to avoid

• you need complex rule engines, DSLs, or centralized configuration like CancanCan or declarative authorization
• you are not working in Ruby or a Rack-based framework
• you need fine-grained attribute-level or row-level security handled at the database layer

Facets

library · maturity stable

auth authorization middleware web-development backend security developer-tools ruby ruby-gem rails policy-objects object-oriented-design access-control web-server

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