Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By : Naren Yellavula
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By: Naren Yellavula

Overview of this book

Building RESTful web services can be tough as there are countless standards and ways to develop API. In modern architectures such as microservices, RESTful APIs are common in communication, making idiomatic and scalable API development crucial. This book covers basic through to advanced API development concepts and supporting tools. You’ll start with an introduction to REST API development before moving on to building the essential blocks for working with Go. You’ll explore routers, middleware, and available open source web development solutions in Go to create robust APIs, and understand the application and database layers to build RESTful web services. You’ll learn various data formats like protocol buffers and JSON, and understand how to serve them over HTTP and gRPC. After covering advanced topics such as asynchronous API design and GraphQL for building scalable web services, you’ll discover how microservices can benefit from REST. You’ll also explore packaging artifacts in the form of containers and understand how to set up an ideal deployment ecosystem for web services. Finally, you’ll cover the provisioning of infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IaC) and secure your REST API. By the end of the book, you’ll have intermediate knowledge of web service development and be able to apply the skills you’ve learned in a practical way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Handling Authentication for our REST Services

In this chapter, we are going to explore Representational State Transfer (REST) API authentication patterns. These patterns are session-based authentication, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), and Open Authentication 2 (OAuth 2.0). We will try to leverage the Gorilla package's sessions library to create basic sessions. Then, we will move on to advanced REST API authentication strategies, such as stateless JWT. Finally, we will discuss the OAuth 2.0 authentication pattern and the security aspects of an API. In the previous chapter, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API Gateway took care of authentication (using Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles) for us. If an API Gateway is not present, how do we secure our API? You will find the answer in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • How simple authentication works...