explain what cache does...

[matiazar]

Hi . can anyone explain what is cached in this repo?

because when I do a
$user->can('edit articles');

it querys the database.. so I dont understand what is cached.

thanks in advance

[anntnzrb]

The cache stores all permissions and their role relationships — basically a snapshot of permissions table + which roles have which permissions. Loaded once, kept in memory/cache.

Why you're still seeing queries:

When you call $user->can('edit articles'), the package needs to check if your specific user has that permission. The cached data doesn't know which users have which roles.

So what happens:

1. Permission lookup → uses cache ✓
2. User's roles/permissions → hits database (loads $user->roles relationship)

The cache prevents querying permissions and roles tables repeatedly, but your user's assigned roles still need to be fetched.

To minimize queries:

// Eager load when fetching users
$user = User::with(['roles', 'permissions'])->find($id);

// Or load manually once
$user->load('roles', 'permissions');

// Then subsequent can() calls won't hit DB
$user->can('edit articles'); // no query
$user->can('delete articles'); // still no query

tl;dr: cache = permission definitions, not user assignments. Eager load user relationships to avoid repeated queries.