A set of API adapters to work with the GDS APIs, extracted from the frontend
app.
Example usage:
publisher_api = GdsApi::Publisher.new(“environment”)
ostruct_publication = publisher_api.publication_for_slug(‘my-published-item’)
panopticon_api = GdsApi::Panopticon.new(“environment”)
ostruct_metadata = panopticon_api.artefact_for_slug(‘my-published-item’)
Very much still a work in progress.
Logging
Each HTTP request can be logged as JSON. Example:
{
“request_uri”:“http://contactotron.platform/contacts/1”,
“start_time”:1324035128.9056342,
“status”:“success”,
“end_time”:1324035129.2017104
}
By default we log to a NullLogger since we don’t want to pollute your test
results or logs. To log output you’ll want to set GdsApi::Base.logger to
something that actually logs:
GdsApi::Base.logger = Logger.new(“/path/to/file.log”)
Middleware for request tracing
We set a unique header at the cache level called Govuk-Request-Id. In order
to serve a user’s request, if apps make API requests they should pass on this
header, so that we can trace a request across the entire GOV.UK stack.
GdsApi::GovukHeaderSniffer middleware takes care of this. This gem contains
a railtie that configures this middleware for Rails apps without extra effort.
Other Rack-based apps should opt-in by adding this line to your config.ru:
use GdsApi::GovukHeaderSniffer, ‘HTTP_GOVUK_REQUEST_ID’
Middleware for identifying authenticated users
Applications can make use of user-based identification for additional
authorisation when making API requests. Any application that is using gds-sso
for authentication can set an additional header called
‘X-Govuk-Authenticated-User’ to identify the currently authenticated user ID.
This will automatically be picked up by the GdsApi::GovukHeaderSniffer
middleware in Rails applications and sent with API requests so that the
downstream service can optionally use the identifier to perform authorisation
on the request. This will be used by content-store as a mechanism to only
return access-limited content to authenticated and authorised users.
App-level Authentication
The API Adapters currently support either HTTP Basic or OAuth2 (bearer token)
authentication. This allows an application to identify itself to another where
required. This is currently used by the GdsApi::Panopticon::Registerer
adapter, which expects a constant called PANOPTICON_API_CREDENTIALS to be
defined that identifies the calling application to Panopticon:
PANOPTICON_API_CREDENTIALS = { bearer_token: ‘MY_BEARER_TOKEN’ }
Test Helpers
There are also test helpers for stubbing various requests in other apps.
Example usage of the panopticon helper:
In test_helper.rb:
require ‘gds_api/test_helpers/panopticon’
class ActiveSupport::TestCase
include GdsApi::TestHelpers::Panopticon
end
In the test:
panopticon_has_metadata(‘id’ => 12345, ‘need_ids’ => [need.id],
‘slug’ => ‘my_slug’)
Dependencies
Some of the helpers come with additional dependencies that you’ll need to
have installed and configured in your consuming app/lib.
At time of writing, these are:
Licence
Released under the MIT Licence, a copy of which can be found in the file
LICENCE.