Proxing requests

Introduction

The restheart.yml configuration file allows defining proxied resources. This makes possible to put other microservices under the security domain of RESTHeart.

How to proxy requests

As an example, we are going to see how to proxy https://httpbin.org/anything through RESTHeart.

https://httpbin.org/anything is a popular and simple online HTTP Request & Response Service that returns anything that is passed to request for testing purposes.

Add the following section to the configuration file restheart.yml and restart RESTHeart:

proxies:
   - location: /anything
     proxy-pass: https://httpbin.org/anything
     name: anything

As a result, requests to URL http://<restheart-ip:port>/anything are proxied to https://httpbin.org/anythingas specified by the parameter proxy-pass.

GET /anything HTTP/1.1

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

With the default configuration RESTHeart uses the Basic Authentication with credentials and permission defined in /users and /acl MongoDB collections. Let’s add a user and a permission for /anything

User:

POST /users HTTP/1.1

{
    "_id" : "user",
    "password": "secret",
    "roles": ["anything"]
}

acl.yml

POST /acl HTTP/1.1

{
    "role": "anything"
    "predicate": "path-prefix[path=/anything] and method[GET]"
}

GET /anything?foo=bar HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Basic dXNlcjpzZWNyZXQ=

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

{
    "args": {
        "foo": "bar"
    },
    "data": "",
    "files": {},
    "form": {},
    "headers": {
        "Accept": "*/*",
        "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate",
        "Host": "httpbin.org",
        "User-Agent": "HTTPie/1.0.3",
        "X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-5ee2508c-35dd55551c2c0188bba66b8f",
        "X-Forwarded-Account-Id": "user",
        "X-Forwarded-Account-Roles": "anything",
        "X-Forwarded-Host": "localhost:8080",
        "X-Forwarded-Server": "localhost"
    },
    "json": null,
    "method": "GET",
    "origin": "127.0.0.1, 93.41.97.239",
    "url": "https://localhost:8080/anything?foo=bar"
}

We can note that RESTHeart:

• has checked the credential specified in /users/user passed via Basic Authentication and proxied the request
• has determined the account roles
• has checked the permission specified in /acl for the account roles and determined that the request could be executed.
• the user id and roles are passed by RESTHeart to the proxied service via the X-Forwarded-Account-Id and X-Forwarded-Account-Roles request header.
• the response headers include the header Auth-Token. Its value can be used in place of the actual password in the Basic Authentication until its expiration. This is useful in Web Applications, for storing in the browser the less sensitive auth token instead of full username and password.