Administrators & Roles

An administrator is a staff member who has access to the Dashboard, and is able to view and modify some or all of the items and settings.

The exact permissions of what a given administrator may view and modify is defined by which roles are assigned to that administrator, and on which channels.

Defining a Role

The role detail page allows you to create a new role or edit an existing one. A role can be thought of as a list of permissions. Permissions are usually divided into four types:

• Create allows you to create new items, e.g. "CreateProduct" will allow one to create a new product.
• Read allows you to view items, but not modify or delete them.
• Update allows you to make changes to existing items, but not to create new ones.
• Delete allows you to delete items.

Vendure comes with a few pre-defined roles for commonly-needed tasks, but you are free to modify these or create your own.

In general, it is advisable to create roles with the fewest amount of privileges needed for the staff member to do their jobs. For example, a marketing manager would need to be able to create, read, update and delete promotions, but probably doesn't need to be able to update or delete payment methods.

The SuperAdmin role

This is a special role which cannot be deleted or modified. This role grants all permissions on every channel, including channels created later. It is used to set up the store initially, and make certain special changes (such as creating new Channels).

The RoleEditor role

Creating, editing and deleting roles requires the RoleEditor role. An administrator can manage a role only when they hold RoleEditor on every channel where that role is assigned. Nobody holds RoleEditor by default: a SuperAdmin grants it to the administrators who manage roles.

Creating Administrators

For each individual that needs to log in to the Dashboard, you should create a new administrator account.

Apart from filling in their details and selecting a strong password, you then need to assign at least one role, and choose the channel it applies to. The same role can be assigned on several channels, and an administrator can hold different roles on different channels. Roles "add together", meaning that when more than one role is assigned on a channel, the combined set of permissions of those roles is granted to that administrator on that channel.

You can only assign a role on a channel when you hold every permission of that role on that channel yourself.

Thus, it is possible to create a set of specific roles "Inventory Manager", "Order Manager", "Customer Services", "Marketing Manager", and them together as needed.