////
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
distributed with this work for additional information
regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
software distributed under the License is distributed on an
"AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations
under the License.
////

[[introduction]]
== Introduction to the Spring Security ACL Plugin

The ACL plugin adds Domain Object Security support to a Grails application that uses Spring Security. It depends on the https://github.com/apache/grails-spring-security[Spring Security Core plugin].

The core plugin and other extension plugins support restricting access to URLs via rules that include checking a user's authentication status, roles, etc. and the ACL plugin extends this by adding support for restricting access to individual domain class instances. The access can be very fine-grained and can define which actions can be taken on an object - these typically include Read, Create, Write, Delete, and Administer but you're free to define whatever actions you like.

To learn about using ACLs in Grails, you can follow the <<tutorial>> and in addition you can download and run a complete Grails application that uses the plugin. Installing and running the application are described in <<sampleApp>>.

In addition to this document, you should read the https://docs.spring.io/spring-security/reference/servlet/authorization/acls.html[Spring Security documentation].