Configuring Authenticated Proxy for Custom Plugins

Introduction

Roadie provides a custom proxy service that can be configured to proxy through an access token minted by our own authentication system that can be validated by your third party service.

This gives a custom plugin a way to interact with your own service. That service can authenticate the incoming requests from Roadie.

Step 1. Create an authenticated proxy configuration in Roadie

You can navigate to /administration/settings/authenticatedProxy. Click add item to add a new proxy.

Enter a Path (e.g. /my-api) and a target API (e.g. https://my-api.com/api) as follows:

Click save and Apply and Restart and wait for the restart. It can take up to about two minutes for the change to be applied.

Step 2 Calling the API from Backstage

You can call this API from the Backstage window context in a browser via a Custom Backstage plugin:

fetch('/api/authenticated-proxy/my-api')

Step 3 Authenticating the Request from the service

The API configured in the Authenticated proxy target will recieve a token in the authorization bearer containing an access token. This token can be sent to the roadie Authentication system to retrieve an id representing the logged in Backstage user.

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://auth.roadie.io/userinfo' \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer {ACCESS_TOKEN}' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json'

This will return the identity as follows:

{
  "sub": "248289761003",
  "name": "John Doe",
  ...
  "updated_at": "1556845729"
}