Managing users/roles/groups in FOSUserBundle

I added the functionality to add default group to the user during registration by overriding the confirmAction in Registration Controller

What I did is I overrided the Registration Controller in my project Bundle by defining the parent to FosUserBUndle .

Then created a function confirmedAction and in the body of the function added this code

$repository = $em->getRepository('AdminAdminBundle:Group');
$group = $repository->findOneByName('staff');

$em = $this->getDoctrine()->getEntityManager();
$user = $this->getUser();
$user->addGroup($group);

$userManager = $this->get('fos_user.user_manager');

$userManager->updateUser($user);

if (!is_object($user) || !$user instanceof FOS\UserBundle\Model\UserInterface) {
    throw new AccessDeniedException('This user does not have access to this section.');
}

return $this->render('FOSUserBundle:Registration:confirmed.html.twig',
                      ['user' => $user]);

And it perfectly saved in db with group assignment.

Hope this will help some one in need as there is little information about the implementation in official fosuserbundle doc.

Symfony Roles

The way FOSUserBundle deals with Roles is to store them in the roles column that you've seen, in a serialised format like this: a:1:{i:0;s:10:"ROLE_ADMIN";}. So there's no need for any other tables or entities^.

^ This is in contrast to Groups, which need to be explicitly configured, are represented by a separate Table/Entity, and do involve relating Users to Groups in the DB. Groups let you define arbitrary collections of Roles which can then be given to each User as a discrete bundle.

A User can be a member of any number of Roles. They're identified by strings starting with "ROLE_", you can just start using a new Role.

What the Roles mean for your application is completely up to you, but they're quite a high-level tool - a User is either in a particular Role or they aren't.

You put people in Roles either via the Symfony console:

php app/console fos:user:promote testuser ROLE_ADMIN

Or in PHP:

$user = $this->getUser();
$userManager = $container->get('fos_user.user_manager');
$user->addRole('ROLE_ADMIN');
$userManager->updateUser($user);

And you can test membership in PHP:

$user = $this->getUser();
if ($user->hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN'))
{
    //do something
}

Or using Annotations:

/**
 * @Security("has_role('ROLE_ADMIN')")
 */
 public function adminAction()
 {
     //...

or

/**
 * @Security("has_role('ROLE_ADMIN')")
 */
class AdminController
{
    //...