Role Export

What is Role Export

The Role Export module allows roles to have machine_names and generates a unique role id (rid) based off of the machine_name. Roles can be exported with Features and get the exact same rid if imported on other sites. Because of this unique rid there is no need to create plugins per contrib module that use the rid in their export code, such as Views, Ctools, Rules, etc. References to this role id will not break on other sites.

#D8CX: I pledge that Role Export will be obsolete on the day that Drupal 8 is released.

Notes

Drupal 6
The D6 version only supports roles that are added via the roles admin page or added via a Features based module. There won't be support for modules that provide their own import and export process for role creation.

FAQ

Why are you doing this?
Consider the following scenario:
Site A: I create a new role (rid = 4, name = teacher). I add a new rule: if a user registers at path /teacher assign the role with rid 4. Now I export the role and the rule to a feature.

Site B: I create a new role (rid = 4, name = super_admin) and use it for something completely different. Now I take the Feature from Site A and enable it. Features will insert the teacher role with rid = 5. The rule is also imported and enabled (contains hard-coded rid 4). Now if someone registers at /teacher ==> bam! they are super_admin now ;-)

Hashing machine names? That will never be unique, are you out of your mind?
Certainly not. There will not be a large number of roles on a Drupal site (if you have more than 50 you're doing it wrong). So we can assume that the probability of an id clash is very, very, very, very low. If you encounter such a case, please report it in the issue queue.

But shouldn't we fix all those broken modules that rely on role ids in their exports?
Yes, ideally they should rely on a unique machine name for role identification. But then all those modules would have to be changed to depend on role_export, which is very unlikely to happen in the Drupal 7 release cycle. Or we would have to provide integration on their behalf, which is also a lot of work. So we go with this pragmatic approach, while the problem has been properly fixed in Drupal 8 core.