FastAPI simple security

API key based security package for FastAPI, focused on simplicity of use:

• Full functionality out of the box, no configuration required
• API key security with local sqlite backend, working with both header and query parameters
• Default 15 days deprecation for generated API keys
• Key creation, revocation, renewing, and usage logs handled through administrator endpoints
• No dependencies, only requiring FastAPI and the python standard library

This module cannot be used for any kind of distributed deployment. It's goal is to help have some basic security features for simple one-server API deployments, mostly during development.

Installation

pip install fastapi_simple_security

Usage

Creating an application

from fastapi_simple_security import api_key_router, api_key_security
from fastapi import Depends, FastAPI

app = FastAPI()

app.include_router(api_key_router, prefix="/auth", tags=["_auth"])

@app.get("/secure", dependencies=[Depends(api_key_security)])
async def secure_endpoint():
    return {"message": "This is a secure endpoint"}

Resulting app is:

API key creation through docs

Start your API and check the logs for the automatically generated secret key if you did not provide one through environment variables.

Go to /docs on your API and inform this secret key in the Authorize/Secret header box. All the administrator endpoints only support header security to make sure the secret key is not inadvertently shared when sharing an URL.

Then, you can use /auth/new to generate a new API key.

And finally, you can use this API key to access the secure endpoint.

API key creation in python

You can of course automate API key acquisition through python with requests and directly querying the endpoints.

If you do so, you can hide the endpoints from your API documentation with the environment variable FASTAPI_SIMPLE_SECURITY_HIDE_DOCS.

Configuration

Environment variables:

• FASTAPI_SIMPLE_SECURITY_SECRET: Secret administrator key

  • Generated automatically on server startup if not provided
  • Allows generation of new API keys, revoking of existing ones, and API key usage view
  • It being compromised compromises the security of the API

• FASTAPI_SIMPLE_SECURITY_HIDE_DOCS: Whether or not to hide the API key related endpoints from the documentation

• FASTAPI_SIMPLE_SECURITY_DB_LOCATION: Location of the local sqlite database file

  • sqlite.db in the running directory by default
  • When running the app inside Docker, use a bind mount for persistence

• FAST_API_SIMPLE_SECURITY_AUTOMATIC_EXPIRATION: Duration, in days, until an API key is deemed expired

  • 15 days by default

Contributing

Setting up python environment

poetry install
poetry shell

Setting up pre-commit hooks

pre-commit install

Running tests

pytest

Running the dev environment

The attached docker image runs a test app on localhost:8080 with secret key TEST_SECRET. Run it with:

docker-compose build && docker-compose up

Needed contributions

• More options with sensible defaults
• Logging per API key?
• More back-end options for API key storage?