rowfence

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Changelog ​

What changed in each release, newest first. An alpha (0.1.0-alpha.1) is for trying a version early: it may still change before that version is released. Before 1.0, a minor release (0.2.0) may change the policy language, the authz.* functions, the SDKs and the file formats: what to do about it is under Upgrading. Each release upgrades from the one before it. How releases are numbered and made: RELEASING.md.

Unreleased ​

0.1.0 (alpha) ​

The first release, as an alpha: for trying rowfence early. Anything in it may still change before 0.1.0 (what a 0.x release promises). It holds:

  • The policy language (.authz): types read from the app's tables, relations from their columns and link tables, permissions built with and, or and not and inherited down trees, rules for each table and command, column rules and masked columns, conditions in SQL, custom roles, shares that expire or carry conditions, scopes, invariants and tests.
  • The rowfence command: compiles a policy into views, trigger-maintained inheritance tables, row-level security policies and authz.* functions, applied as the tables' owner, with no extension and no superuser. Each change to the policy is a migration for Alembic, Prisma, Drizzle Kit, plain SQL, goose, dbmate or Flyway. Beside it: init, dev, test (with coverage), prove, review, diff, why, fmt, lint, indexes, plans, bench, graph, the generated clients, Studio, the language server and an MCP server for coding agents.
  • What apps call (authz.*): signing in (act_as, API keys, JWTs), checks and lists (can, list, perms_of), sharing, who has access and why, the audit trail and change feed, access requests, break-glass, access reviews and view-as.
  • The SDKs: Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, psycopg, asyncpg, Alembic, pytest) and TypeScript (pg, postgres.js, Prisma, Drizzle, Next.js, React, Vitest).
  • The review for pull requests: a GitHub action and a GitLab CI template that comment what a policy change does to access.
  • Editors: VS Code, Zed, and a Tree-sitter grammar for Helix and Neovim.

PostgreSQL 16, 17 and 18. Installed with npm (the command with its own Python), pip or the Docker image: Installing.