Implementing Role-Based Access Control for Company Users in Django

Today, I completed the Company Group implementation for my Placement Portal MVP.

Instead of assigning permissions manually to every company user, I decided to leverage Django's built-in Groups and Permissions framework.

What I Implemented

I created a Django management command named:

setup_groups

The command performs two tasks:

• Creates the Company group if it doesn't already exist.
• Assigns all required model permissions to that group.

The permissions currently include:

• Job model → Create, Read, Update, Delete
• Application model → View only
• Company model → View and Update

Now, setting up permissions is as simple as running:

python3 manage.py setup_groups

Why Groups?

Assigning permissions to every user individually becomes difficult to maintain as the number of users grows.

Using Groups provides:

• Better scalability.
• Centralized permission management.
• Easier onboarding of new company users.

Queryset Customization

Permissions alone are not sufficient.

A company should only be able to see:

• Its own job posts.
• Applications submitted for its jobs.
• Its own company profile.

Querysets are customized accordingly in Django Admin to provide proper data isolation between organizations.

Automatic Group Assignment

During user creation in Django Admin:

• If the user's role is Company, the Company group is automatically assigned.

This eliminates manual permission assignment entirely.

Final Thoughts

Role-based access control is more than just adding permissions. It also involves controlling what users can actually see inside the application.

Building RBAC early makes future scaling significantly easier and keeps the permission model clean and maintainable.