Authenticating Orbital to other services

Orbital will pass authentication headers to upstream services when sending requests.

Configuration is either through the UI, or by a file stored on the Orbital server.

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File based configuration

Orbital will read / write authentication settings from a file on the orbital server.

The location of the file is configurable by setting vyne.auth.config-file setting, and defaults to config/auth.conf.

Orbital uses a HOCON format for it’s config files. (HOCON is a superset of JSON, so JSON is also valid.)

Here’s a sample config:

authenticationTokens {
   "com.acme.MyService" { // The fully qualified name of a service, as defined in a taxi schema.  Should be surrounded in quotes.
      tokenType = AuthorizationBearerHeader // Only `AuthorizationBearerHeader` is supported at present
      value = "Hello, World"
   }
}

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Authentication token types

At present, only AuthorizationBearerHeader is supported, however we plan on expanding support as required.

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Authorization Bearer tokens

Setting the tokenType to AuthorizationBearerHeader will add a header of Authorization: Bearer ${tokenValue} to outbound requests.

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Using environment variables

Environment variables can be used in authentication config files.

authenticationTokens {
   "com.acme.MyService" {
      tokenType = AuthorizationBearerHeader
      value = ${foo} // The enviroment variable of 'foo' is read and substituted
   }
}

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Other configuration approaches

Authentication configuration is always persisted to the file described above. However, there are ways of adding / removing to the configuration without requiring file access.

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UI configuration

Authentication tokens can be added, modified and deleted through the UI, via the Authentication Manager.

Changes made here are persisted in the configured authentication file.

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REST API

Authentication tokens can be added, modified and deleted through the REST API:

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Create or update token

POST to /api/tokens/service/{serviceName}:

{
   "tokenType" : "AuthorizationBearerHeader",
   "value" : "yourAPIToken"
}

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Deleting a token

Deletes a token

DELETE to /api/tokens/service/{serviceName}

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Listing configured tokens

It is possible to list the configured tokens. However, the token values are not returned.

GET to /api/tokens

[ { "serviceName" : "com.foo.MyService", "tokenType" : "AuthorizationBearerHeader" } ]