We did a podcast about the ACL Packager with Justin Edelson, Co-Project Lead for ACS AEM Commons and ACS Adobe Experience Manager Tools, in which we talked at length about the usefulness of this feature.
What is it?
From the ACS GitHub page about ACL Packager: “Frequently, access control entries need to be copied from one environment to another without copying the actual content itself, just the access control entries. This user interface allows you to define and build packages containing access control entries for particular paths and/or particular principals.”
How it works
This is closely related to Query Packager. It cleans up broken policy nodes from one env to another, without syncing the content.
On every piece of content there is a node called rep:policy; this node drives the permissions that given users and groups (rep:Authorizables) have on that node. If you need to adjust permissions without changing the content node, being able to easily package up a set of rep:policy nodes is a great benefit. See the ACS GitHub page for a breakdown of how to use it. The page includes instructions and several screenshots.
Audience impact (admins)
Admins – Admins create the rules that drive the package creation.
Example application
This is really useful for multi-environment projects where you have to copy around ACLs from one instance to another. Adobe support actually created this tool, but with a different UI and code structure as they found that this was a common support request. The ACS AEM Commons team then took their version and made it fit with the visual style of ACS AEM Commons.
The other area where it is interesting to use is for analysis. If you want to get a dump of all the ACLs to see what they are, this tool can be very helpful.