Using Tyk to inject additional auth details

Support Installation and Deployment
1

We have a set of legacy APIs that I’m trying to unite behind a single Tyk Gateway.

Each has its own set of authentication methods, with keys for each user.

What I’d like to be able to do is have a mechanism such as:

  1. Request comes in to the Gateway, Tyk authenticates.
  2. End-API key is looked up from storage
  3. Request is passed to the End-API using the key from storage

Is this something that Tyk is suited for, or am I trying to stretch it too far?

2

Hi

This is straightforward to do with Tyk - there a few different options depending on your implementation but something like a post-auth python plugin could do the job. We’ve got some docs around an example here //tyk.io/docs/plugins/supported-languages/rich-plugins/python/custom-auth-python-tutorial/

Thanks
Josh

3

Thanks Josh,

As a somewhat-related follow up, is it also possible to use middleware to alter the destination of the request itself?

For example, to use the value of a URL to decide which end-server the request goes to.

Eg:

/api/AB123456 -> ab.server/api/123456
/api/XY123456 -> xy.server/api/123456

4

Yes you can trigger url rewrite on a whole host of factors - the docs are here URL Rewriting

5

Thanks,

Can the two be combined? For example, using a Python library to specify how the query is rewritten?

6

You can expose the request variables to python plugins so yes you can easily alter the request in any way you want in the middleware.

7

Thanks. Regarding the library part, there is no mention of installing libraries in the doc - is there a way to do that by packaging them?

8

Using the basic Python that gets built with the binary I dont think so. gRPC used with a richer python plugin is likely the best way to this.

https://tyk.io/docs/customise-tyk/plugins/rich-plugins/grpc/

9

Just in case anybody else is searching, I was able to install libraries using pip in the container. This is mentioned here: