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API Keys

Authentication and Authorization

With the API Key Authentication Policy configured on your API routes you can build additional policies that run after the API Key Authentication policy to perform additional checks or authorization on the consumer.

Request User Object

After each successful authentication the policy will set the request.user object. The name of the API Key consumer is set to the request.user.sub property. Any metadata attached to the consumer is set to the request.user.data property. The interface of request.user is shown below.

Code
/**
 * The User object set by the API Key Authentication policy
 */
interface User {
  /**
   * The name of the API Key consumer
   */
  sub: string;
  /**
   * The metadata attached to the API Key consumer
   */
  data: any;
}

So if you created a consumer with the following configuration:

Code
{
  "name": "my-consumer",
  "metadata": {
    "companyId": 12345,
    "plan": "gold"
  }
}

The request object would be the following:

Code
context.log.debug(request.user);
// Outputs:
// {
//   sub: "my-consumer",
//   data: {
//     companyId: 12345,
//     plan: "gold"
//   }
// }

Using Consumer Data in Code

It's possible to write additional policies that run after the API Key Authentication policy that perform further gating or authorization of the request based on the data set in the consumer.

For example, you could gate access to a feature by checking for the plan value stored in metadata (exposed via request.user.data.plan).

Code
async function (request: ZuploRequest, context: ZuploContext) {
  if (request.user?.data.plan !== "gold") {
    return new Response("You need to upgrade your plan", {
      status: 403
    });
  }
  return new Response("you have the gold plan!");
}

The metadata could also be used to route requests to dedicated customer services.

Code
async function (request: ZuploRequest, context: ZuploContext) {
  const { customerId } = request.user.data;
  return fetch(`https://${customerId}.customers.example.com/`
}

The request.user object can be used in both handlers and policies

If you had a simple function handler as follows, it would return a request.user object to your route if the API Key is successfully authenticated:

Code
async function (request: ZuploRequest, context: ZuploContext) {
  // auto-serialize the user object and return it as JSON
  return request.user;
}

Would send the following response.

Code
{
  "sub": "my-consumer",
  "data": {
    "companyId": 12345,
    "plan": "gold"
  }
}

Testing API Key Authentication

When running tests there are several ways to handle API Key authentication. The following strategies cover testing with API Key authentication both locally and in deployed environments.

Testing locally

When running API Key Authentication locally, if you link the project to a project, the same API Key bucket is shared by both your development (working copy) environment and local development.

Setting the API Key bucket name

Either locally or in CI/CD you can specify any API Key bucket on the API Key Authentication policy by setting the bucketName property. This allows using a consistent API Key bucket that is set up with consumers as required for testing. You can use the Zuplo Developer API to create and manage buckets, consumers, keys, and more.

Selectively disabling

Another option is to disable authentication on endpoints for testing purposes. One way of doing this is to configure the API Key Authentication policy to allow unauthenticated requests through. This can be done by setting allowUnauthenticatedRequests to true.

In order to enforce authentication with this setting disabled, you can create a policy that comes after that selectively enforces auth based on some condition.

For example, an environment variable flag could be used to disable auth with the following policy.

Code
import {
  ZuploContext,
  ZuploRequest,
  environment,
  HttpProblems,
} from "@zuplo/runtime";

export default async function enforceAuth(
  request: ZuploRequest,
  context: ZuploContext,
) {
  if (environment.DISABLE_AUTH === "AUTH_DISABLED") {
    return request;
  }

  if (!request.user) {
    return HttpProblems.unauthorized(request, context);
  }

  return request;
}