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The Ranger best practices page describes several efficient ways to use Ranger.

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Creating effective policies

The following best practices help you create efficient policies:
  • Start with groups, not users: Always create policies for groups rather than individual users. When a user changes roles, update their group membership rather than modifying dozens of policies.
  • Use naming conventions: Establish and enforce naming standards for policies, services, and roles. This makes finding and managing policies much easier as the system grows.
  • Resource specification: Determine which objects a policy applies to and use wildcards strategically, especially with sensitive data. For example, database=finance, table=*, column=* grants access to all columns of all tables in the finance database.
  • User or group selection: When adding multiple users or groups to a policy, understand the following logic:
    • Users or groups within a policy are OR’d together, meaning any match between the two grants access.
    • Multiple policies with different resources are independently evaluated.
  • Permission selection: Grant minimum necessary permissions, for example:
    • Grant only SELECT for read-only access, not ALL.
    • Grant INSERT for data loading processes, not DROP or ALTER.
  • Policy conditions: Add conditions to restrict access further, for example:
    • IP range: 192.168.1.0/24 limits access to the corporate network.
    • Time: 9:00-17:00 restricts access to business hours.
    • Custom conditions: Access data only if the user’s department matches the data owner.
  • Policy priority: When policies conflict, Ranger uses a priority order. For example:
    • In deny policies, priority 1 always wins.
    • Among allow policies, the higher priority number wins.
    • If no matching policy exists, then Ranger denies access by default.

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Advanced policy patterns

The following best practices help you implement advanced policy patterns efficiently:
  • Tag-based policies: Instead of creating policies for each table, do the following:
    • Tag tables in the metadata system with classifications such as PII, SENSITIVE, or PUBLIC.
    • Create Ranger policies based on tag tables so that new tables automatically inherit the policies associated with those tags.
  • Policy templates: For repetitive policy patterns, create a template policy. When applying it to new resources, adjust only the resource path and specific users.
  • Time-limited access: For contractors or temporary projects, create policies with specific validity periods. Ranger can automatically disable policies after the end date.
  • Break-glass access: Create disabled “emergency access” policies that can be quickly enabled during incidents when normal access channels fail.

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Policy testing and validation

The following best practices help you detect issues early and verify that policies are behaving as intended:
  • Test before production: Create development and staging Ranger instances that mirror production. Test new policies in these environments before deploying to production.
  • Policy simulator: Before deploying policies, use Ranger’s policy evaluation tools to test how Ranger handles specific access requests. If you input a user, resource, and operation, you can see which policies apply and what the decision would be.
  • Audit log review: After deploying new policies, monitor audit logs for unexpected denials. If Ranger blocks legitimate users, adjust the policies accordingly.
  • User feedback loop: Establish a process for users to request access when denied. This creates a feedback mechanism to identify missing or incorrect policies.

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Policy migration and promotion

The following best practices help you migrate Ranger policies between environments and manage policy changes safely:
  • Environment promotion: When promoting policies from a development environment to production ensure the following:
    • Export policies from a development Ranger instance in JSON format.
    • Review and adjust the policies for production environment differences.
    • Import the policies into production during the maintenance window.
    • Monitor the policies for issues and prepare to rollback.
  • Version control: Store policy exports in Git or a similar version control system. This provides change history, enables code review of policy changes, and facilitates disaster recovery.

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Ongoing maintenance

The following best practices help you keep policies accurate, up to date, and aligned with your organization’s requirements over time:
  • Document policies: Use the policy description field to explain why a policy exists, who requested it, and any special considerations. This helps future administrators understand policy intent.
  • Regular audits: Periodically review policies to identify and remove obsolete permissions, identify overly permissive policies, and ensure policies align with the current organizational structure.

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Additional resources