Recently, our team encountered a problem. We need to release a feature that uses a role model with a lot of business logic depending on different roles. The implementation was ready, integration tests were written, and services were deployed in a test environment. So it’s time to throw new features to QA engineers…

The first idea that came to our mind was to simply create multiple accounts for each role and use them. But we ran into a problem. For some reason, our company has simply restricted the use of test accounts. By the way, we can’t use swagger functions for testing because of GraphQL. We need a solution that can be used with different tools, different platforms, etc. because the tester has to test in an environment that he is used to.

Spring Boot starer

Here I’m introducing a super-simple spring-boot starter that allows us to test the role model via http header. spring-x-roles-authorities-starter allows you to simply add the X-Roles header to your request, and after authorization, the roles that you specified will be set for your request.

// Basic authentication
GET https://example.com/endpoint
Authorization: // any auth
X-Roles: my-role, another-role

Allows hitting this endpoint, even if your real account doesn’t contain this role:

@RestController
final class Controller {

    @GetMapping("/endpoint")
    @PreAuthorize("hasAnyAuthority('my-role')")
    public ResponseEntity<String> sayHi() {
        return "Hi!";
    }
}

That’s all, thanks!