Connect your service to Buildly

Overview

This tutorial explains how to connect an existing service to Buildly.

Once you connect your service to Buildly, it will be able to communicate with all of your other services over a core authentication layer. All of its endpoints will be exposed as part of a single API that Buildly puts together from all of the services. You also have the option to use Buildly for managing permissions and users.

Requirements

There are no requirements for the language or framework used to code your service. It must only satisfy these conditions in order to connect to Buildly:

  1. Your service must follow the OpenAPI (Swagger) spec.
  2. You need to expose a swagger.json file at the /docs endpoint.
  3. Your service must use an OAuth2 library with support for JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). See the Implement JWT authorization section for more information.

Implement JWT authorization

Next, you need to implement Buildly’s authorization method.

About Buildly authorization

For external requests to modules (e.g., Buildly UI users), Buildly uses an OAuth2 flow to issue JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) signed with RS256.

Buildly’s public key should be exposed as the environment variable JWT_PUBLIC_KEY_RSA_BUILDLY inside the container where the service is deployed. The service must use this environment variable to decode requests from Buildly.

Buildly passes the JWT to the service in the Authorization HTTP header using the format JWT {token}. Example:

Authorization: JWT eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJSUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJiaWZyb3N0IiwiZXhwIjoxNTYwNjA0OTc2LCJpYXQiOjE1NjA1MTg1NzYsImNvcmVfdXNlcl91dWlkIjoiODJiZGI2YTMtMjExOS00MThmLThjMmQtY2FhYjdlYmI4OTc1Iiwib3JnYW5pemF0aW9uX3V1aWQiOiJiMjY1YmFkNS1iODEyLTRmNDItYjNlZS0zNDFlYmJiNzJjNmIiLCJzY29wZSI6InJlYWQgd3JpdGUiLCJ1c2VybmFtZSI6ImFkbWluIn0.CV8PafWuGDZSpWRI5wC6btO6cyt9udI9P5uLBdnHzVhbbIY-LH1o3qBgnRf0OAreUhRfl7zBTBMNO56pbyWeyg

Example using PyJwt

Here’s an example using the PyJwt library. It takes the encoded_jwt from the HTTP header and decodes it with the JWT_PUBLIC_KEY_RSA_BUILDLY environment variable:

import jwt

jwt.decode(encoded_jwt, os.environ['JWT_PUBLIC_KEY_RSA_BUILDLY'], algorithms=['RS256'])

The Buildly JWT payload looks like this:

  • core_user_uuid: UUID of the [CoreUser](/model/permissions#coreuser) who initiated the request.
  • exp: Datetime when the token expires.
  • iat: Datetime when the token was issued.
  • iss: Issuer of the JWT. This will always be buildly.
  • organization_uuid: UUID of the [Organization](/model/permissions#organization) that contains the CoreUser who initiated the request.
  • scope: Permission scopes granted in the request by Buildly.
  • username: The username of the CoreUser who initiated the request.

Add Your Service to Buildly

After finishing the JWT authorization implementation, deploying your service somewhere and exposing it externally, you need to add it to Buildly.

To add your service to Buildly, make sure it meets the prerequisites, then navigate to the Buildly admin page at https://<YOUR-BUILDLY-URL>/admin and log into it. Then, under the section Core you will see Logic Module, click on it and add a new one with the following properties:

  • Name: The name of your service for identification
  • Endpoint: The host of your microservice e.g. https://my-amazing-service.com
  • Endpoint Name: The API endpoint for your service (just type the name of the endpoint, for example, amazing

Now, your service will be accessed by Buildly and exposed following the structure https://<BUILDLY-URL>/api/<ENDPOINT-NAME>, so our service example above will be accessable via the URL https://<YOUR-BUILDLY-URL>/api/amazing.

To verify that this has worked, navigate to the Buildly docs at https://<YOUR-BUILDLY-URL>/docs and you should see the Swagger documentation for your service under Buildly’s documentation.

(Optional) Implement Buildly permissions model

If you want to implement the Buildly Permissions model in your services, then you need to create WorkflowLevels for each of your data models and implement them in the models. We recommend creating WorkflowLevel1s for all top-level data models in your service and WorkflowLevel2s for defining any nested data relationships.

Use the following endpoints of your app’s API URL to define WorkflowLevels:

  • POST /workflowlevel1: Create WorkflowLevel1
    • Add the property workflowleve1_uuid to the data model and set the value to the UUID from the response.
  • POST /workflowlevel2: Create WorkflowLevel2
    • Add the property workflowleve2_uuid to the data model and set the value to the UUID from the response.
    • If it’s got a parent WorkflowLevel2, then add the property parent_workflowlevel2 to the data model and set the value to the UUID of its parent WorkflowLevel2.

Appendix: Reserved endpoint names

The following endpoint names are reserved by Buildly and may not be implemented in your services’ APIs:

  • /admin
  • /oauth
  • /health_check
  • /docs
  • /complete
  • /disconnect
  • /static
  • /workflow
  • /core
  • /logicmodule
  • /milestone
  • /organization