auth

Authentication Example

This example showcases a typical approach to handling authorization and authentication behind a gateway. In this example, there are 2 services apart from the gateway itself. One service is in charge of user information (including their password) and the other handles a todo list. The intent is that a user logs in and can see their specific todo list.

The general flow goes something like:

• The user service defines a mutation called loginUser that checks if the credentials are valid and responds with a token.

• Somehow (not shown here), the client holds onto this tokens and sends it with future requests to the gateway under the Authorization header.

• When the gateway receives a query, it looks for the token and if its present, sends the value as the USER_ID header when sending queries to the services.

• The other services uses the header value to perform whatever user-specific logic is required.

• The current user can query for their User record with the viewer gateway field

Keep in mind that this demo should not be taken as an example of a secure authorization system. Its purpose is just to illustrate how one can pass pass user-specific information onto the backing services.

Running the example

To run the example, start the services defined in users.go and todo.go first by running go run <file name> from this directory. You'll have to run them in separate terminals. Then in a third terminal, start the gateway.go and visit http://localhost:4000 which should show you a playground to interact with.

User Credentials

In this example, there are 3 users (numbered 1,2,3) with credentials that take the form username1/password1. Each of them has a unique set of todo items.