RESTful Account Management

Please note

This tutorial assumes that you’ve read the Quickstart and the Authentication and Authorization guides.

Except for the relatively rare occurrence of open (and generally read-only) public APIs, most services are only accessible to authenticated users. A common pattern is that users create their account on a website or with a mobile application. Once they have an account, they are allowed to consume one or more APIs. This is the model followed by most social networks and service providers (Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.) So how do you, the service provider, manage to create, edit and delete accounts while using the same API that is being consumed by the accounts themselves?

In the following paragraphs we’ll see a couple of possible Account Management implementations, both making intensive use of a host of Eve features such as Custom Endpoint Security, Role Based Access Control, User-Restricted Resource Access, Event Hooks.

We assume that SSL/TLS is enabled, which means that our transport layer is encrypted, making both Basic Authentication and Token-Based Authentication valid options to secure API endpoints.

Let’s say we’re upgrading the API we defined in the Quickstart tutorial.

Accounts with Basic Authentication

Our tasks are as follows:

  1. Make an endpoint available for all account management activities (/accounts).
  2. Secure the endpoint, so that it is only accessible to clients that we control: our own website, mobile apps with account management capabilities, etc.
  3. Make sure that all other API endpoints are only accessible to authenticated accounts (created by means of the above mentioned endpoint).
  4. Allow authenticated users to only access resources created by themselves.

1. The /accounts endpoint

The account management endpoint is no different than any other API endpoint. It is just a matter of declaring it in our settings file. Let’s declare the resource schema first.

schema =  {
    'username': {
        'type': 'string',
        'required': True,
        'unique': True,
        },
    'password': {
        'type': 'string',
        'required': True,
    },
},

Then, let’s define the endpoint.

accounts = {
    # the standard account entry point is defined as
    # '/accounts/<ObjectId>'. We define  an additional read-only entry
    # point accessible at '/accounts/<username>'.
    'additional_lookup': {
        'url': 'regex("[\w]+")',
        'field': 'username',
    },

    # We also disable endpoint caching as we don't want client apps to
    # cache account data.
    'cache_control': '',
    'cache_expires': 0,

    # Finally, let's add the schema definition for this endpoint.
    'schema': schema,
}

We defined an additional read-only entry point at /accounts/<username>. This isn’t really a necessity, but it can come in handy to easily verify if a username has been taken already, or to retrieve an account without knowing its ObjectId beforehand. Of course, both pieces of information can also be found by querying the resource endpoint (/accounts?where={"username": "johndoe"}), but then we would need to parse the response payload, whereas by hitting our new endpoint with a GET request we will obtain the bare account data, or a 404 Not Found if the account does not exist.

Once the endpoint has been configured, we need to add it to the API domain:

DOMAIN['accounts'] = accounts

2. Securing the /accounts/ endpoint

2a. Hard-coding our way in

Securing the endpoint can be achieved by allowing only well-known superusers to operate on it. Our authentication class, which is defined in the launch script, can be hard-coded to handle the case:

import bcrypt
from eve import Eve
from eve.auth import BasicAuth


class BCryptAuth(BasicAuth):
    def check_auth(self, username, password, allowed_roles, resource, method):
        if resource == 'accounts':
            return username == 'superuser' and password == 'password'
        else:
            # use Eve's own db driver; no additional connections/resources are used
            accounts = app.data.driver.db['accounts']
            account = accounts.find_one({'username': username})
            return account and \
                bcrypt.hashpw(password, account['password']) == account['password']


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = Eve(auth=BCryptAuth)
    app.run()

Thus, only the superuser account will be allowed to consume the accounts endpoint, while standard authentication logic will apply to all other endpoints. Our mobile app (say) will add accounts by hitting the endpoint with simple POST requests, of course authenticating itself as a superuser by means of the Authorization header. The script assumes that stored passwords are encrypted with bcrypt (storing passwords as plain text is never a good idea). See Basic Authentication for an alternative, faster but less secure SHA1/MAC example.

2b. User Roles Access Control

Hard-coding usernames and passwords might very well do the job, but it is hardly the best approach that we can take here. What if another superurser account needs access to the endpoint? Updating the script each time a privileged user joins the ranks does not seem appropriate (it isn’t). Fortunately, the Role Based Access Control feature can help us here. You see where we are going with this: the idea is that only accounts with superuser and admin roles will be granted access to the endpoint.

Let’s start by updating our resource schema.

     schema =  {
         'username': {
             'type': 'string',
             'required': True,
             },
         'password': {
             'type': 'string',
             'required': True,
         },
         'roles': {
             'type': 'list',
             'allowed': ['user', 'superuser', 'admin'],
             'required': True,
         }
     },

We just added a new roles field which is a required list. From now on, one or more roles will have to be assigned on account creation.

Now we need to restrict endpoint access to superuser and admin accounts only so let’s update the endpoint definition accordingly.

 accounts = {
     # the standard account entry point is defined as
     # '/accounts/<ObjectId>'. We define  an additional read-only entry
     # point accessible at '/accounts/<username>'.
     'additional_lookup': {
         'url': 'regex("[\w]+")',
         'field': 'username',
     },

     # We also disable endpoint caching as we don't want client apps to
     # cache account data.
     'cache_control': '',
     'cache_expires': 0,

     # Only allow superusers and admins.
     'allowed_roles': ['superuser', 'admin'],

     # Finally, let's add the schema definition for this endpoint.
     'schema': schema,
 }

Finally, a rewrite of our authentication class is in order.

from eve import Eve
from eve.auth import BasicAuth
from werkzeug.security import check_password_hash


class RolesAuth(BasicAuth):
    def check_auth(self, username, password, allowed_roles, resource, method):
        # use Eve's own db driver; no additional connections/resources are used
        accounts = app.data.driver.db['accounts']
        lookup = {'username': username}
        if allowed_roles:
            # only retrieve a user if his roles match ``allowed_roles``
            lookup['roles'] = {'$in': allowed_roles}
        account = accounts.find_one(lookup)
        return account and check_password_hash(account['password'], password)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = Eve(auth=RolesAuth)
    app.run()

What the above snippet does is secure all API endpoints with role-base access control. It is, in fact, the same snippet seen in Role Based Access Control. This technique allows us to keep the code untouched as we add more superuser or admin accounts (and we’ll probably be adding them by accessing our very own API). Also, should the need arise, we could easily restrict access to more endpoints just by updating the settings file, again without touching the authentication class.

3. Securing other API endpoints

This will be quick, as both the hard-coding and the role-based access control approaches above effectively secure all API endpoints already. Passing an authentication class to the Eve object enables authentication for the whole API: every time an endpoint is hit with a request, the class instance is invoked.

Of course, you can still fine-tune security, for example by allowing public access to certain endpoints, or to certain HTTP methods. See Authentication and Authorization for more details.

4. Only allowing access to account resources

Most of the time when you allow Authenticated users to store data, you only want them to access their own data. This can be convenientely achieved by using the User-Restricted Resource Access feature. When enabled, each stored document is associated with the account that created it. This allows the API to transparently serve only account-created documents on all kind of requests: read, edit, delete and of course create.

There are only two things that we need to do in order to activate this feature:

  1. Configure the name of the field that will be used to store the owner of the document;
  2. Set the document owner on each incoming POST request.

Since we want to enable this feature for all of our API endpoints we’ll just update our settings.py file by setting a proper AUTH_FIELD value:

# Name of the field used to store the owner of each document
AUTH_FIELD = 'user_id'

Then, we want to update our authentication class to properly update the field’s value:

 from eve import Eve
 from eve.auth import BasicAuth
 from werkzeug.security import check_password_hash


 class RolesAuth(BasicAuth):
     def check_auth(self, username, password, allowed_roles, resource, method):
         # use Eve's own db driver; no additional connections/resources are used
         accounts = app.data.driver.db['accounts']
         lookup = {'username': username}
         if allowed_roles:
             # only retrieve a user if his roles match ``allowed_roles``
             lookup['roles'] = {'$in': allowed_roles}
         account = accounts.find_one(lookup)
         # set 'AUTH_FIELD' value to the account's ObjectId
         # (instead of _Id, you might want to use ID_FIELD)
         self.set_request_auth_value(account['_id'])
         return account and check_password_hash(account['password'], password)


 if __name__ == '__main__':
     app = Eve(auth=RolesAuth)
     app.run()

This is all we need to do. Now when a client hits say the /invoices endpoint with a GET request, it will only be served with invoices created by its own account. The same will happen with DELETE and PATCH, making it impossible for an authenticated user to accidentally retrieve, edit or delete other people’s data.

Accounts with Token Authentication

As seen in Token-Based Authentication, token authentication is just a specialized version of Basic Authentication. It is actually executed as a standard Basic Authentication request where the value of the username field is used for the token, and the password field is not provided (if included, it is ignored).

Consequently, handling accounts with Token Authentication is very similar to what we saw in Accounts with Basic Authentication, but there’s one little caveat: tokens need to be generated and stored along with the account, and eventually returned to the client.

In light of this, let’s review our updated task list:

  1. Make an endpoint available for all account management activities (/accounts).
  2. Secure the endpoint so that it is only accessible to clients (tokens) that we control.
  3. On account creation, generate and store its token.
  4. Optionally, return the new token with the response.
  5. Make sure that all other API endpoints are only accessible to authenticated tokens.
  6. Allow authenticated users to only access resources created by themselves

1. The /accounts/ endpoint

This isn’t any different than what we did in Accounts with Basic Authentication. We just need to add the token field to our schema:

     schema =  {
         'username': {
             'type': 'string',
             'required': True,
             'unique': True,
             },
         'password': {
             'type': 'string',
             'required': True,
         },
         'roles': {
             'type': 'list',
             'allowed': ['user', 'superuser', 'admin'],
             'required': True,
         },
         'token': {
             'type': 'string',
             'required': True,
         }
     }

2. Securing the /accounts/ endpoint

We defined the roles field for the accounts schema in the previous step. We also need to define the endpoint, making sure that we set the allowed user roles.

 accounts = {
     # the standard account entry point is defined as
     # '/accounts/<ObjectId>'. We define  an additional read-only entry
     # point accessible at '/accounts/<username>'.
     'additional_lookup': {
         'url': 'regex("[\w]+")',
         'field': 'username',
     },

     # We also disable endpoint caching as we don't want client apps to
     # cache account data.
     'cache_control': '',
     'cache_expires': 0,

     # Only allow superusers and admins.
     'allowed_roles': ['superuser', 'admin'],

     # Finally, let's add the schema definition for this endpoint.
     'schema': schema,
 }

And finally, here is our launch script which is, of course, using a TokenAuth subclass this time around:

from eve import Eve
from eve.auth import TokenAuth


class RolesAuth(TokenAuth):
    def check_auth(self, token,  allowed_roles, resource, method):
        # use Eve's own db driver; no additional connections/resources are used
        accounts = app.data.driver.db['accounts']
        lookup = {'token': token}
        if allowed_roles:
            # only retrieve a user if his roles match ``allowed_roles``
            lookup['roles'] = {'$in': allowed_roles}
        account = accounts.find_one(lookup)
        return account


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = Eve(auth=RolesAuth)
    app.run()

3. Building custom tokens on account creation

The code above has a problem: it won’t authenticate anybody, as we aren’t generating any token yet. Consequently, clients aren’t getting their auth tokens back so they don’t really know how to authenticate. Let’s fix that by using the awesome Event Hooks feature. We’ll update our launch script by registering a callback function that will be called when a new account is about to be stored to the database.

 from eve import Eve
 from eve.auth import TokenAuth
 import random
 import string


 class RolesAuth(TokenAuth):
     def check_auth(self, token,  allowed_roles, resource, method):
         # use Eve's own db driver; no additional connections/resources are used
         accounts = app.data.driver.db['accounts']
         lookup = {'token': token}
         if allowed_roles:
             # only retrieve a user if his roles match ``allowed_roles``
             lookup['roles'] = {'$in': allowed_roles}
         account = accounts.find_one(lookup)
         return account


 def add_token(documents):
     # Don't use this in production:
     # You should at least make sure that the token is unique.
     for document in documents:
         document["token"] = (''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_uppercase)
                                      for x in range(10)))


 if __name__ == '__main__':
     app = Eve(auth=RolesAuth)
     app.on_insert_accounts += add_token
     app.run()

As you can see, we are subscribing to the on_insert event of the accounts endpoint with our add_token function. This callback will receive documents as an argument, which is a list of validated documents accepted for database insertion. We simply add (or replace in the unlikely case that the request contained it already) a token to every document, and we’re done! For more information on callbacks, see Event Hooks.

4. Returning the token with the response

Optionally, you might want to return the tokens with the response. Truth be told, this isn’t a very good idea. You generally want to send access information out-of-band, with an email for example. However we’re assuming that we are on SSL, and there are cases where sending the auth token just makes sense, like when the client is a mobile application and we want the user to use the service right away.

Normally, only automatically handled fields (ID_FIELD, LAST_UPDATED, DATE_CREATED, ETAG) are included with POST response payloads. Fortunately, there’s a setting which allows us to inject additional fields in responses, and that is EXTRA_RESPONSE_FIELDS, with its endpoint-level equivalent, extra_response_fields. All we need to do is update our endpoint definition accordingly:

 accounts = {
     # the standard account entry point is defined as
     # '/accounts/<ObjectId>'. We define  an additional read-only entry
     # point accessible at '/accounts/<username>'.
     'additional_lookup': {
         'url': 'regex("[\w]+")',
         'field': 'username',
     },

     # We also disable endpoint caching as we don't want client apps to
     # cache account data.
     'cache_control': '',
     'cache_expires': 0,

     # Only allow superusers and admins.
     'allowed_roles': ['superuser', 'admin'],

     # Allow 'token' to be returned with POST responses
     'extra_response_fields': ['token'],

     # Finally, let's add the schema definition for this endpoint.
     'schema': schema,
 }

From now on responses to POST requests aimed at the /accounts endpoint will include the newly generated auth token, allowing the client to consume other API endpoints right away.

5. Securing other API endpoints

As we’ve seen before, passing an authentication class to the Eve object enables authentication for all API endpoints. Again, you can still fine-tune security by allowing public access to certain endpoints or to certain HTTP methods. See Authentication and Authorization for more details.

6. Only allowing access to account resources

This is achieved with the User-Restricted Resource Access feature, as seen in Accounts with Basic Authentication. You might want to store the user token as your AUTH_FIELD value, but if you want user tokens to be easily revocable, then your best option is to use the account unique id for this.

Basic vs Token: Final Considerations

Despite being a little more tricky to set up on the server side, Token Authentication offers significant advantages. First, you don’t have passwords stored on the client and being sent over the wire with every request. If you’re sending your tokens out-of-band, and you’re on SSL/TLS, that’s quite a lot of additional security.