guardpost 0.0.8

Basic framework to handle authentication and authorization in any kind of Python application.

GuardPost

GuardPost provides a basic framework to handle authentication and authorization in any kind of Python application.

pip install guardpost

To install with support for JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) validation:

pip install guardpost[jwt]

This library is freely inspired by authorization in ASP.NET Core; although its implementation is extremely different.

Notable differences are:

1. GuardPost is abstracted from the code that executes it, so it's not bound to the context of a web framework.
2. GuardPost implements both classes for use with synchronous code (not necessarily I/O bound), and classes using async/await syntax (optimized for authentication and authorization rules that involve I/O bound operations such as web requests and communications with databases).
3. GuardPost leverages Python function decorators for the authorization part, so any function can be wrapped to be executed after handling authorization.
4. The code API is simpler.

More documentation and examples

For documentation and examples, refer to the project Wiki.

To see how guardpost is used in blacksheep web framework, read the documentation here:

• Authentication
• Authorization

Both for async/await and synchronous code

GuardPost can be used both with async/await code and with synchronous code, according to use cases and users' preference.

If you have doubts about authentication vs authorization...

Authentication answers the question: Who is the user who is executing the action?, or more in general: Who is the user, or what is the service, that is executing the action?.

Authorization answers the question: Is the user, or service, authorized to do something?.

Usually, to implement authorization, is necessary to have the context of the entity that is executing the action. Anyway, the two things are logically separated and GuardPost is designed to keep them separate.

Usage in BlackSheep

guardpost is used in the BlackSheep web framework to implement authentication and authorization strategies for request handlers.