Applications that run inside the Google App Engine can use Google Accounts for user authentication. I already used this feature and it works great. I just want to know how this is working. Is there a HTTP cookie created? How can an application inside the GAE see that a user is logged in?
The AppEngine SDK takes care of the details for you, but essentially it generates the equivalent of an OAuth request to the Google Account service. All interactions with the login process go through the Google Account service (and thus the cookies it uses for session tracking are not available to the individual app).
Related
I would like to have an app deployed in App Engine to display information which are stored in BigQuery or Cloud Storage, but only if the user is authenticated in the webapp AND its permissions as set in IAM allow it.
So far, I can authenticate a user in App Engine through "Google Sign-In" as seen in https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/oauth/, but those credentials don't seem to relate to those that are set in Cloud IAM.
I've seen how to set credentials for App Engine as a whole though a service account, but that seems to wide.
What I really want is to authenticate users on the web app, and then let IAM decide if those users are allowed to access data or not.
How would you proceed to do that?
Thanks for any help
The authenticating as an end user GCP documentation explains how to limit access to the project's resources using Cloud IAM. It also has a short example about authenticating an end user to call the BigQuery API.
I am really fed up. All I see the Google App Engine tutorial was just making the example on how to authenticate without password. What if I want to authenticate directly from my gmail account, how can I do it???
User the google provided users service which can use your google account for auth.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/usingusers
Google App Engine provides several useful services based on Google infrastructure, accessible by applications using libraries included with the SDK. One such service is the Users service, which lets your application integrate with Google user accounts. With the Users service, your users can use the Google accounts they already have to sign in to your application.
I want to implement some form of access control for a REST API implemented in App engine. Is it possible to get the list of GAE Applications that a user has permissions to administer or view in the app engine console. Or whether the user has permissions to administer/view the current application.
Note: the Users API does not work for me because this is a rest server called by another google app not a web service called by a user from the browser. OAuth API seems promising but I was unable to find an OAuth scope or rest endpoint for getting GAE related information.
there is no API that can provide a "list of GAE Applications that a user has permissions to administer." Google Cloud Endpoints on App Engine (Trusted Tester program) may be useful for hosting custom RESTful APIs with user authorization may be useful, read more here: http://endpoints-trusted-tester.appspot.com/
There must be an API as the Google Eclipse plugin is using it.
https://developers.google.com/eclipse/docs/signin?hl=de
But it is not documented.
I've set up an AppEngine account using Google Apps Authentication and I've resigned myself to the fact that it can't be changed. But can you switch the domain that it's bound to?
UPDATE
Forgot one point. We've already added users from the new domain as AppEngine administrators and we're able to log into the AppEngine console with them. But there are certain URLs in the app itself (e.g. cron jobs/task queues) that we've restricted to access by admins only. When we try to access them, we are directed to the domain-specific AppEngine page (i.e. http://appengine.google.com/a/myolddomain.com) to log in. When I update the URL to the new domain, I can log in but then I get a page saying "The page is requesting permission to access your Google account. Select an account you would like to use." And there are no options in the list to select. I can click Continue but then I'm redirected back to the login page for the old domain again.
No. If you created an app with Google Apps authentication, it is tied to that domain to authenticate against forever. This only matters if you're using the Users API, of course.
Yes you can switch to another domain. App Engine is a service in your apps domain. Because it is a service, I think you can add the same appspot service to multiple apps domains.
I am developing an app to be hosted on Google App Engine. Users will be able to use their Google IDs to login to the app. The app also has a client counterpart in the form of a Blackberry Application.
My question is - is there a suggested way for my app to collect the user's Google credentials so that I can authenticate it against Google using OpenID semantics? In Android, for example, I can use the Accounts API so that I don't need to explicitly ask the user to enter credentials. What's the way to do this in Blackberry?
I see 2 ways, neither of which is ideal:
Write my own form in my native Blackberry app where the user enters Google ID and password, which I then use to obtain the authenticator token and perform the rest of the authentication behind the scenes. But the point is - it is inappropriate to ask a user to trust my app with their Google credentials.
Use standard Google Open ID Authentication mechanism - which opens up the web browser and displays Google's Open ID login page. Although this is a one-time thing (after which I can save the authentication token so that future requests to GAE do not require any prompting for credentials), the user experience is still disruptive since it involves opening the browser in addition to my native BB app.
So, what's the suggested way forward?
Using the browser to authenticate is pretty much the only standard way to do this. A number of Android apps do this for OAuth or OpenID endpoints too. Depending on how the Blackberry's protocol handlers work, you should be able to set a continue URL that results in your app being called back by the browser when authentication completes.