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accessmap-api: AccessMap's user/profiles/auth API

Why?

AccessMap users want to securely store and access settings, routing profiles, and other information across browsers and devices.

How?

accessmap-api is a fairly boilerplate Flask application (a popular Python web framework) with roughly RESTful interfaces: it uses HTTP verbs appropriately for GET, POST, PUT, etc. accessmap-api is only compatible with Python 3.6+.

Installation

accessmap-api is developed using poetry, which makes development, releases, and installation more simple and reproducible. The best way to install accessmap-api into a development environment is to use the poetry tool

poetry install

A guide for installing poetry itself can be found here: https://poetry.eustace.io/docs/

This command will create an isolated virtual environment for all of accessmap-api's dependencies. You can now run any commands in this environment by prepending poetry run to the command. We'll set up a testing database to show how it works, but first we need to set up our configuration.

Configuration

Configuration of accessmap-api is done with environment variables. Flask supports the use of a .env file that contains ENV_VAR=value lines or using the default environment variables available on the system. Note that system environment variables will supercede entries in the .env file.

Please note that all of the following environment variables that are marked "required" are necessary for accessmap-api to function correctly and securetly.

  • SECRET_KEY (required): This is a secret used to sign / secure sessions during a request context. It is very imporatnt to keep this value secure, particularly if your application is exposed to the internet. It is a best practice to generate the value of most secrets using a secure hashing algorithm with a good source of entropy - something like ssh-keygen.

  • JWT_SECRET_KEY (required): This is a secret used to sign JWTs issued by accessmap-api and is the most important secret to get correct, as JWTs will be publicly sent to clients (over HTTPS). It must be kept private and generated using best practices (like ssh-keygen).

  • SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI: An SQLAlchemy-compatible database URI. This defauls to an SQLite3 database stored at /tmp/accessmap-api.db (for development), but can be any valid SQLAlchemy URI for postgres, mysql, etc.

  • OAUTH_CACHE_DIR: A path used to cache OAuth data - i.e. user-authorized token information. This makes auth workflows more efficient. This defaults to /tmp/accessmap-api-cache.

  • OSM_CLIENT_ID (required): AccessMap currently uses OpenStreetMap for authentication. This is the OAuth 1.0a client ID of your registered application.

  • OSM_CLIENT_SECRET (required): AccessMap currently uses OpenStreetMap for authentication. This is the OAuth 1.0a client secret of your registered application.

  • OSM_URI: The base API path to use when talking to OpenStreetMap for authentication. It is important to use the testing/development server(s) when trying out new features that might impact the data on OpenStreetMap or expose a client's credentials, so this is set to the primary OpenStreetMap testing URI by default. For production applications using HTTPS and secure secrets, use https://api.openstreetmap.org. Keep in mind that you will need to separately register OAuth 1.0a applications for the testing OpenStreetMap API vs. the main one, so they will have different OSM_CLIENT_ID and OSM_CLIENT_SECRET credentials.

  • OSM_CONSUMER_CALLBACK_URI (required): as a security precaution, this API will currently only send OAuth callback redirects to a URI (URL) defined by this environment variable. The callback URI defined by this variable will be appended with access_token and refresh_token URL parameters defining a JWT access token and a JWT refresh token for use with protected accessmap-api endpoints. OSM_CONSUMER_CALLBACK_URI should therefore be a client URI such as an instance of accessmap-webapp, e.g. http://localhost:3000/callback in development mode.

Creating and migrating the database

accessmap-api uses Flask-Migrate, which uses the alembic library to manage database migrations. To initialize a database, run:

poetry run flask db upgrade

If you make changes to the database and need to create a new migration, run:

poetry run flask db migrate

Running accessmap-api

By default, accessmap-api runs a werkzeug development server. For a production system, you should use a WSGI framework. accessmap-api comes with a script to assist deployments using a WSGI runner: wsgi.py. It is important to note that it is currently hard-coded to assume that you are running accessmap-api at the /api subdirectory of your production host, for example https://example.com/api.