AuthServer

A simple authentication server in Python Flask

What is this?

This is a simple server where a user can create an account with user, password, first and last name, log into it and, once logged in, see the account data, modify it or delete it.

Authentication logic

Authentication here is done via Bearer Tokens; upon login, the user will get a Bearer Token in a cookie that will identify one particular account and that will last for 2 hours (configurable). For every request that requires being logged, that Bearer Token should be sent in the same cookie that was received or in the Authorization header.

Server Configuration

All the relevant application configuration values are stored in the application.conf files that can be found in the resources directory.

The file system in that directory allows for general configuration properties (the app directory) and per environment configuration properties (the env directory).

Finally, there is a sensitive.conf (that would normally be ignored but doesn't make sense for the scope of this) that should be injected directly in to the server and hold things like the database password or the app secret, which is used for signing token cookies.

Database migration

Database migration is automatic and run before the server starts by analyzing all the Model objects we have in the application and whether they have changed (or been created). See manage.py.

Running the server

To start the server locally:

1. Have Docker installed and running
2. Have docker-compose installed
3. Execute the command make run

The last step will start two Docker containers, one with the PostgreSQL database and another one with the Flask app. Once it's up and running, you can access it in localhost:5000 (see the Postman collection for examples).

Testing the application

To run all the unit and integration tests:

1. Run the make prepare command to create the virtual environment with all the required libraries.
2. Run make test.