sanjivyash / AuthAPI

Dummy Authorization API written in GoFiber, a web framework for Golang

Authenticated API for Blockchain Applications

Download and install the project with

go get github.com/sanjivyash/AuthAPI

You need to set up a storage pipeline before running the application. The dummy storage that the application uses is set up as follows after navigating to the main project directory:

mkdir storage
touch storage/users.json storage/tokens.json

After this, the server can be run simply with

go run main.go

All dependencies are mentioned in the go.mod file. To test the server, run

bash test.sh

from the project root directory, which will display the appropriate message. Please note that the tests require Python installed in your system. Windows users may have permission problems, which has been addressed here (a bigger problem might be running bash at all 🙃)

Environment Variables

The development environment variables are stored in config/dev.env. The default file is as follows:

PORT=:3000
ENDPOINT=api
BASE_DIR=/src/github.com/sanjivyash/AuthAPI
TOKEN_LENGTH=16
TIME_LIMIT=3600

Please ensure that your GOPATH environment variable is set as it is used in conig/config.go. If your Golang settings are different from the standard one, just set the BASE_DIR variable to the absolute path of project directory, and remove the if block inside conig/config.go involving the condition key == "BASE_DIR".

Authentication mechanism

• A new user is allowed to sign up with a unique username and password, stored in the storage/users.json file.
• Upon logging in, a token with a finite lifetime is issued controlled by the following environment varaibles:
  • TOKEN_LENGTH controls the length of the issued token.
  • TIME_LIMIT controls the number of seconds after which the token expires.
• To request any information, the token must be sent as a query parameter.

User can log in again upon expiry of the token. Sessions or JWTs have not been implemented because we do not use a web browser to make requests in blockchain networks.

Endpoints for the application

The config/dev.env file contains various environment variables set for the application, one of which is ENDPOINT, the level at which the API operates. All requests are made to /$ENDPOINT/*. This API supports the following requests:

POST /$ENDPOINT/signup              # new user signup
POST /$ENDPOINT/login               # new user login
GET  /$ENDPOINT/info?token=$token   # token authentication is done

You can either use curl or an application like POSTMAN to make these requests. All data received and transmitted is in JSON format. The signup and login requests require a file like the one shown below:

{
    "username": "admin",
    "password": "admin"
}

Errors and messages are sent by the API in JSON format as well.