Welcome to the acl_system plugin for rails. This plugin is designed to give you a flexible declarative way of protecting your various controller actions using roles. It’s made to sit on top of any authentication framework that follows a few conventions. You will need to have a current_user method that returns the currently logged in user. And you will need to make your User or Account model(or whatever you named it) have a has_and_belongs_to_many :roles. So you need a model called Role that has a title attribute. Once these two things are satisfied you can use this plugin.