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Authentication

The REST extension provides two main ways to authenticate:

  • via Basic Access Authentication (\Cundd\Rest\Authentication\BasicAuthenticationProvider)
  • via Login Requests (\Cundd\Rest\Authentication\CredentialsAuthenticationProvider)

And a fallback via an existing user session (\Cundd\Rest\Authentication\RequestAuthenticationProvider).

All of the methods are built around the fe_users table: The BasicAuthenticationProvider and CredentialsAuthenticationProvider methods validate given credentials by comparing against the username (column: username) and API key (column: tx_rest_apikey). Whereas the RequestAuthenticationProvider checks for an already existing frontend user session.

Limitations

  • Currently it isn't possible to force the usage of a specific Authentication Provider.
  • No ACL. Different users can not be limited to specific resources.

Configuring a frontend user

Frontend users are Webservice users. To allow a user to authenticate through the BasicAuthenticationProvider or CredentialsAuthenticationProvider methods specify the users API key inside the User record in the TYPO3 Backend.

Enable Authentication

To require a user to be authenticated to access a path set the read and/or write configuration in TypoScript to require:

plugin.tx_rest.settings.paths {
    my_protectedext {
        path = my_protectedext-*
        read = require
        write = require
    }
}

Basic Auth

A popular way of authentication with Webservices is through Basic Access Authentication. Use the user's API key as password when making a request.

If this method should be used without the Apache PHP module (mod_php; e.g. with CGI or FastCGI) the server must be configured to pass the sent header to the PHP script. This may be done in the .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization},L]

Login Request

An alternative is to authenticate through a separate Login Request. To log in send a POST request to /rest/auth/login with a body containing username and apikey.

Example:

POST /rest/auth/login HTTP/1.1
Host: your-domain.com
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

username=myUserName&apikey=myApiKey

In addition to logging in this method allows to get the current login status:

curl -X GET http://your-domain.com/rest/auth/login

and to log out from the Webservice:

curl -X POST http://your-domain.com/rest/auth/logout

(Actually this method is not really restful, because it neglects the principle of being Stateless.)