Chapter 3. ActiveDocs & OAuth

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a set of ActiveDocs that will allow your users to easily test and call your OAuth-enabled API from one place.

If you have an OAuth-enabled API, you will want to show off its capabilities to your users. How can you do this using ActiveDocs? While this is a bit trickier than usual, it’s still possible.

3.1. Prerequisites

Before you begin, you’ll need to have configured the required OAuth endpoints for your chosen workflow. If you’re using NGINX as your API gateway, you follow the steps in the Set up OAuth with APIcast tutorial. Additionally, you will need to be familiar with how to set up ActiveDocs – see Add ActiveDocs and Create a (Swagger) spec.

3.2. Client credentials and resource owner flows

This first example is for an API using the OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow. This API accepts any path and returns information about the request (path, request parameters, headers, etc.). The Echo API is only accessible using a valid access token. Users of the API are only able to call it once they have exchanged their credentials (client_id and client_secret) for an access token.

In order for users to be able to call the API from ActiveDocs, they will need to request an access token. Since this is just a call to an OAuth authorization server, you can create an ActiveDocs spec for the OAuth token endpoint. This will allow you to call this endpoint from within ActiveDocs. In this case, for a client credentials flow, the Swagger JSON spec looks like this:

{
  "swagger": "2.0",
  "info": {
    "version": "v1",
    "title": "OAuth for Echo API",
    "description": "OAuth2.0 Client Credentails Flow for authentication of our Echo API.",
    "contact": {
      "name": "API Support",
      "url": "http://www.swagger.io/support",
      "email": "support@swagger.io"
    }
  },
  "host": "nginx-oauth.herokuapp.com",
  "basePath": "/oauth",
  "schemes": [
    "http"
  ],
  "paths": {
    "/token": {
      "post": {
        "description": "This operation returns the access token for the API. You must call this before calling any other endpoints.",
        "operationId": "oauth",
        "parameters": [
          {
            "name": "client_id",
            "description": "Your client id",
            "type": "string",
            "in": "query",
            "required": true
          },
          {
            "name": "client_secret",
            "description": "Your client secret",
            "type": "string",
            "in": "query",
            "required": true
          },
          {
            "name": "grant_type",
            "description": "OAuth2 Grant Type",
            "type": "string",
            "default": "client_credentials",
            "required": true,
            "in": "query",
            "enum": [
                "client_credentials",
                "authorization_code",
                "refresh_token",
                "password"
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

For a resource owner OAuth flow, you’ll probably also want to add parameters for a username and password, as well as any other parameters that you require in order to issue an access token. For this client credentials flow example, you’re just sending the client_id and client_secret – which can be populated from the 3scale values for signed-in users – as well as the grant_type.

Then in the ActiveDocs spec for our Echo API we need to add the access_token parameter instead of the client_id and the client_secret.

{
  "swagger": "2.0",
  "info": {
    "version": "v1",
    "title": "Echo API",
    "description": "A simple API that accepts any path and returns information about the request",
    "contact": {
      "name": "API Support",
      "url": "http://www.swagger.io/support",
      "email": "support@swagger.io"
    }
  },
  "host": "echo-api.3scale.net",
  "basePath": "/v1/words",
  "schemes": [
    "http"
  ],
  "produces": [
    "application/json"
  ],
  "paths": {
    "/{word}.json": {
      "get": {
        "description": "This operation returns information about the request (path, request parameters, headers, etc.),
        "operationId": "wordsGet",
        "summary": "Returns the path of a given word",
        "parameters": [
          {
            "name": "word",
            "description": "The word related to the path",
            "type": "string",
            "in": "path",
            "required": true
          },
          {
            "name": "access_token",
            "description": "Your access token",
            "type": "string",
            "in": "query",
            "required": true
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

You can then include your ActiveDocs in the Developer Portal as usual. In this case, since you want to specify the order in which they display to have the OAuth endpoint first, it looks like this:

{% active_docs version: "2.0" services: "oauth" %}





<script type="text/javascript">
  $(function () {
    window.swaggerUi.load(); // <-- loads first swagger-ui

    // do second swagger-ui

    var url = "/swagger/spec/echo-api.json";
    window.anotherSwaggerUi = new SwaggerUi({
      url: url,
      dom_id: "another-swagger-ui-container",
      supportedSubmitMethods: ['get', 'post', 'put', 'delete', 'patch'],
      onComplete: function(swaggerApi, swaggerUi) {
        $('#another-swagger-ui-container pre code').each(function(i, e) {hljs.highlightBlock(e)});
      },
      onFailure: function(data) {
        log("Unable to Load Echo-API-SwaggerUI");
      },
      docExpansion: "list",
      transport: function(httpClient, obj) {
        log("[swagger-ui]>>> custom transport.");
        return ApiDocsProxy.execute(httpClient, obj);
      }
    });

    window.anotherSwaggerUi.load();

  });
</script>