Roles

Roles are the foundation of Vendure's role-based access control (RBAC) system. A Role is a named collection of Permissions that determines what actions an administrator is allowed to perform.

How roles work

Each Administrator is assigned one or more Roles. When an administrator makes a request to the Admin API, Vendure checks whether their combined roles include the permission required for that operation. If not, the request is denied.

When an administrator has multiple roles, the permissions from all roles are unioned together. This means an administrator with an "Order Manager" role and a "Catalog Manager" role can perform all actions allowed by either role.

Built-in roles

Vendure creates two special roles automatically. These roles cannot be modified or deleted:

SuperAdmin — carries every permission in the system. This role is assigned to the first administrator created during server initialization. It grants unrestricted access to all operations across all channels.
Customer — assigned to every registered customer. This role carries the minimum permissions required for a customer to manage their own account, such as viewing their order history and updating their profile.

Custom roles

Beyond the built-in roles, administrators can create any number of custom roles to match their organizational structure. A custom role is defined by selecting the specific permissions it should grant.

Common patterns include roles like "Inventory Manager" (stock and product permissions), "Order Processor" (order and fulfillment permissions), or "Marketing Lead" (promotion and collection permissions). The granularity of Vendure's permission system means you can tailor roles precisely to each team member's responsibilities.

Channel-scoped roles

Roles can optionally be scoped to one or more Channels. This is a powerful feature for multi-tenant and multi-vendor setups where different administrators should only have access to specific parts of the system.

For example, in a marketplace scenario, a seller's administrator might have a "Seller Product Manager" role that is scoped only to that seller's channel. They can manage products within their channel but have no visibility into other channels or the default channel.

A single administrator can have a mix of channel-scoped and global roles, providing flexible access control that scales with the complexity of your business.

Role assignment

Roles are assigned to administrators through the Admin API or the admin interface. Changes take effect on the administrator's next authenticated request — there is no need to invalidate sessions.