Check if a user has a role

Question

How can I check if a user has a certain role?

Answer 1

Checking for a permission is recommended over checking for a role. When you use permissions, you can assign that permission to multiple roles, which makes your system more flexible. Also, remember that roles can be renamed, which would break your code.

That said, if you want to check for a role, you can do this:

// The currently logged-in user is stored in a global variable.
global $user;

// Check if the user has the 'editor' role.
if (in_array('editor', $user->roles)) {
  // do fancy stuff
}

Answer 2

To check if the current user has a single role or any of multiple roles, a great way is to do:

//can be used in access callback too
function user_has_role($roles) {
    //checks if user has role/roles
    return !!count(array_intersect(is_array($roles)? $roles : array($roles), array_values($GLOBALS['user']->roles)));
};

if (user_has_role(array('moderator', 'administrator'))) {
  // $user is admin or moderator
} else if(user_has_role('tester')){
  // $user is tester
} else{
  // $user is not admin and not moderator
}

Answer 3

Update for Drupal version >= 7.36

You can use function user_has_role from Drupal API https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21user%21user.module/function/user_has_role/7.

Try this example:

<?php
function MYMODULE_foo() {
  $role = user_role_load_by_name('Author');
  if (user_has_role($role->rid)) {
    // Code if user has 'Author' role...
  }
  else {
    // Code if user doesn't have 'Author' role...
  }

  $user = user_load(123);

  if(user_has_role($role->rid, $user)) {
    // Code if user has 'Author' role...
  }
  else {
    // Code if user doesn't have 'Author' role...
  }
}
?>

Answer 4

Here's the actual code from the comment that is referred to in the accepted answer as the best practice

<?php
  function mymodule_perm() {
    return array('access something special');
  }

  function dosomethingspecial() {
    // For current user
    if (user_access('access something special')) {
      // Doing something special!
    }

    // For a specific user
    if (user_access('access something special', $theuser)) {
      // Doing something special!
    }
  }
?>

Answer 5

To be futureproof in case the role name changes it's best to check for the role id (rid) which can be found in the role table in the database.

If you want to check for a role with rid 16, do:

// Load the currently logged in user.
global $user;

// Check if the user has the 'editor' role, when 'editor' has role id 16
if (array_key_exists(16, $user->roles)) {
  // do fancy stuff
}

Answer 6

There's user_has_role() which accepts a role ID. So you could first get a role ID from a role name and then pass that to user_has_role().

$role = user_role_load_by_name('My Role');
$role_id = $role ? $role->rid : NULL;
global $user;
if ($role_id && user_has_role($role_id, $user)) {
  // Yes, this user has this role.
}

Answer 7

The other answers didn't work; I am not sure why. I used the following code.

global $user;

// Check to see if $user has the administrator role.
if (in_array('administrator', array_values($user->roles))) {
  // Do something.
}

A helper function could look like this.

/**
 * Check to see if a user has been assigned a certain role.
 *
 * @param $role
 *   The name of the role you're trying to find.
 * @param $account
 *   The account to check; if not given, use the currently logged-in user.
 *
 * @return
 *   TRUE if the user object has the role.
 */
function _user_has_role($role, $account = NULL) {
  global $user;
  if (!isset($account)) {
    $account = $user;
  }

  return (is_array($account->roles) && in_array($role, array_values($account->roles));
}

Answer 8

to check if a user has a certain role:

function test_role(){
   global $user;
   if(isset($user->roles['my_role'])){
     return true;
   }
   else {
    return false;
 }
}