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Overview

The "secured" endpoints in apps behave a little bit differently from the secured endpoints in Terrain. Specifically, the secured endpoints in Terrain actually require user authentication whereas those in apps merely require information about the user making the request.

Calling Secured Terrain Endpoints

All secured endpoints in Terrain require an HTTP header containing a JSON Web Token (JWT). The specific header to use depends on the format of the JWT, but in most cases it will be X-Iplant-De-Jwt. Please see the root API documentation page for details.

Calling "Secured" Apps Endpoints

None of these endpoints are actually secured. They retain the "secured" label because they're fronted by endpoints in Terrain that are secure. That is, the user interface doesn't hit the apps services directly. Instead, it sends the request to a Terrain endpoint that forwards the request to a corresponding endpoint in apps. The initial purpose of this separation was to provide scalability and separation of concerns.

All secured endpoints in apps support four query-string parameters containing user attributes:

  • user - the username
  • email - the user's email address
  • first-name - the user's first name
  • last-name - the user's last name

Not all of these parameters are required by every secured service in apps; the only parameter that is required by all secured services is user. The rest of the parameters are only required when the information in them is specifically required. Terrain always passes all of these parameters to apps when it forwards requests.

A Simple Example

One of the simplest endpoints in both Terrain and apps is the /apps/categories endpoint, which is used to obtain the list of app categories that are visible to the user.

The call to the Terrain service would look like this:

$ curl -H "$AUTH_HEADER" "http://by-tor:8888/apps/categories"

The equivalent call to the apps service would look like this:

$ curl "http://by-tor:9999/apps/categories?user=nobody&email=nobody@iplantcollaborative.org&first-name=Nobody&last-name=Inparticular"