Permissions

Journey does not maintain its own roles or access-control lists. Once a request has been authenticated (see authentication), Journey delegates authorization to Canvas by calling the Canvas account permissions API for the caller against a target account. A user's effective permissions on a Journey resource are whatever Canvas reports for that user on the resource's account.

How permission checks work

Endpoints that require a Canvas permission resolve a target accountId and then ask Canvas whether the caller holds the required permission on that account. The account is resolved from the request — typically the accountId API argument, falling back to the x-canvas-account-id header. When an endpoint does not name a specific permission, the default check is read_as_admin.

Different endpoints require different Canvas permissions depending on what they do — for example a course-management endpoint may require manage_courses_admin. The required permission and the account it is checked against are part of each endpoint's contract.

Some endpoints perform a non-throwing check instead: they look up whether the caller is a Canvas admin and adjust their behavior accordingly (for example returning a richer result for admins) rather than rejecting non-admins outright.

401 vs 403

401 Unauthorized means the request has no valid Canvas JWT — see authentication. 403 Forbidden means the JWT was accepted but the caller lacks the required Canvas permission on the resolved account, or the account ID could not be resolved from the request. Depending on how Canvas responds, a denied permission may surface as either status — Canvas explicitly denying access maps to 403, while a permission key that is present-but-false in Canvas's response may surface as 401. For the response envelope, see errors.