What is permify?

Permify is an open-source tool that handles permissions and access control for your application. Instead of writing custom logic to figure out who can view, edit, or delete what, you define your rules in one place and let the service handle the checks. It is modeled after Google's internal authorization system, aiming to bring that same level of robustness to any team. At a high level, you define your permission rules using a specialized language that supports traditional role-based permissions, relationship-based logic, and attribute-based rules. Once your rules are in place, your application talks to the service via an API to ask questions like "can this user access this document?" It also includes tools to test your permission logic before deploying it, and supports multi-tenancy if you need isolated permission models for different applications. This would be useful for product teams building apps with complex sharing or access needs. For example, a Google Docs-like product where users can share documents with specific people, grant view-only or edit access, and manage permissions across nested folders. Or a B2B SaaS platform where different customers need entirely different role structures. Instead of scattering permission checks throughout your codebase, you centralize them and get an auditable record of how access decisions are made. The project is built in Go and can be started locally with a single command. It stores authorization data in memory by default for quick testing, but can be configured to use a proper database for production. The README does not go into deep detail on database options or deployment specifics, pointing instead to separate documentation for those topics.