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[[acl-introduction]]
== Introduction to the Spring Security ACL Plugin

The ACL plugin adds Domain Object Security support to a Grails application that uses Spring Security. It depends on the https://github.com/apache/grails-spring-security[Spring Security Core plugin].

The core plugin and other extension plugins support restricting access to URLs via rules that include checking a user's authentication status, roles, etc. and the ACL plugin extends this by adding support for restricting access to individual domain class instances. The access can be very fine-grained and can define which actions can be taken on an object - these typically include Read, Create, Write, Delete, and Administer but you're free to define whatever actions you like.

To learn about using ACLs in Grails, you can follow the <<acl-tutorial>> and in addition you can download and run a complete Grails application that uses the plugin. Installing and running the application are described in <<acl-sampleApp>>.

In addition to this document, you should read the https://docs.spring.io/spring-security/reference/servlet/authorization/acls.html[Spring Security documentation].