Anything that exposes an HTTP API (whether an individual microservice or an application as a whole) needs to control who can run those APIs and when. OPA makes it easy to write fine-grained, context-aware policies to implement API authorization.

In this tutorial, you’ll use a simple HTTP web server that accepts any HTTP GET request that you issue and echoes the OPA decision back as text. Both OPA and the web server will be run as containers.

For this tutorial, our desired policy is:

• People can see their own salaries (GET /finance/salary/{user} is permitted for {user})
• A manager can see their direct reports’ salaries (GET /finance/salary/{user} is permitted for {user}’s manager)

This tutorial requires Docker Compose to run a demo web server along with OPA.

First, create a docker-compose.yml file that runs OPA and the demo web server.

docker-compose.yml:

Then run docker-compose to pull and run the containers.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up

Every time the demo web server receives an HTTP request, it asks OPA to decide whether an HTTP API is authorized or not using a single RESTful API call. An example code is , but the crux of the (Python) code is shown below.

# Grab basic information. We assume user is passed on a form.
http_api_user = request.form['user']
# Get the path as a list (removing leading and trailing /)
# Example: "/finance/salary/" will become ["finance", "salary"]
http_api_path_list = request.path.strip("/").split("/")
input_dict = {  # create input to hand to OPA
    "input": {
        "user": http_api_user,
        "path": http_api_path_list, # Ex: ["finance", "salary", "alice"]
        "method": request.method  # HTTP verb, e.g. GET, POST, PUT, ...
    }
}
# ask OPA for a policy decision
# (in reality OPA URL would be constructed from environment)
rsp = requests.post("http://127.0.0.1:8181/v1/data/httpapi/authz", json=input_dict)
if rsp.json()["allow"]:
  # HTTP API allowed
else:
  # HTTP API denied

2. Load a policy into OPA.

In another terminal, create a policy that allows users to request their own salary as well as the salary of their direct subordinates.

example.rego:

package httpapi.authz
# bob is alice's manager, and betty is charlie's.
subordinates = {"alice": [], "charlie": [], "bob": ["alice"], "betty": ["charlie"]}
import input
default allow = false
# Allow users to get their own salaries.
allow {
  some username
  input.method == "GET"
  input.path = ["finance", "salary", username]
  input.user == username
# Allow managers to get their subordinates' salaries.
allow {
  some username
  input.method == "GET"
  input.path = ["finance", "salary", username]
  subordinates[input.user][_] == username
}

Then load the policy via OPA’s REST API.

curl -X PUT --data-binary @example.rego \
  localhost:8181/v1/policies/example

The following command will succeed.

curl --user alice:password localhost:5000/finance/salary/alice

{
  "method": "GET",
  "path": ["finance", "salary", "alice"],
  "user": "alice"
}

When the webserver queries OPA it asks for a specific policy decision. In this case, the integration is hardcoded to ask for /v1/data/httpapi/authz. OPA translates this URL path into a query:

The answer returned by OPA for the input above is:

{
  "allow": true,
  "subordinates": {
    "alice": [],
    "betty": [
      "charlie"
    ],
    "bob": [
      "alice"
    ],
    "charlie": []
  }
}

4. Check that bob can see alice’s salary (because bob is alice’s manager.)

bob is not charlie’s manager, so the following command will fail.

curl --user bob:password localhost:5000/finance/salary/charlie

6. Change the policy.

Suppose the organization now includes an HR department. The organization wants members of HR to be able to see any salary. Let’s extend the policy to handle this.

example-hr.rego:

package httpapi.authz
import input
# Allow HR members to get anyone's salary.
allow {
  input.method == "GET"
  input.path = ["finance", "salary", _]
  input.user == hr[_]
# David is the only member of HR.
hr = [
  "david",
]

Upload the new policy to OPA.

curl -X PUT --data-binary @example-hr.rego \
  http://localhost:8181/v1/policies/example-hr

For the sake of the tutorial we included manager_of and hr data directly inside the policies. In real-world scenarios that information would be imported from external data sources.

Check that david can see anyone’s salary.

curl --user david:password localhost:5000/finance/salary/alice
curl --user david:password localhost:5000/finance/salary/bob
curl --user david:password localhost:5000/finance/salary/charlie
curl --user david:password localhost:5000/finance/salary/david

8. (Optional) Use JSON Web Tokens to communicate policy data.

OPA supports the parsing of JSON Web Tokens via the builtin function io.jwt.decode. To get a sense of one way the subordinate and HR data might be communicated in the real world, let’s try a similar exercise utilizing the JWT utilities of OPA.

example.rego:

{
  "token": "eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VyIjoiYWxpY2UiLCJhenAiOiJhbGljZSIsInN1Ym9yZGluYXRlcyI6W10sImhyIjpmYWxzZX0.rz3jTY033z-NrKfwrK89_dcLF7TN4gwCMj-fVBDyLoM",
  "method": "GET",
  "path": ["finance", "salary", "alice"],
  "user": "alice"

And load it into OPA:

curl -X PUT --data-binary @example.rego \
  localhost:8181/v1/policies/example

For convenience, we’ll want to store user tokens in environment variables (they’re really long).

export ALICE_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VyIjoiYWxpY2UiLCJhenAiOiJhbGljZSIsInN1Ym9yZGluYXRlcyI6W10sImhyIjpmYWxzZX0.rz3jTY033z-NrKfwrK89_dcLF7TN4gwCMj-fVBDyLoM"
export BOB_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VyIjoiYm9iIiwiYXpwIjoiYm9iIiwic3Vib3JkaW5hdGVzIjpbImFsaWNlIl0sImhyIjpmYWxzZX0.n_lXN4H8UXGA_fXTbgWRx8b40GXpAGQHWluiYVI9qf0"
export CHARLIE_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VyIjoiY2hhcmxpZSIsImF6cCI6ImNoYXJsaWUiLCJzdWJvcmRpbmF0ZXMiOltdLCJociI6ZmFsc2V9.EZd_y_RHUnrCRMuauY7y5a1yiwdUHKRjm9xhVtjNALo"
export BETTY_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VyIjoiYmV0dHkiLCJhenAiOiJiZXR0eSIsInN1Ym9yZGluYXRlcyI6WyJjaGFybGllIl0sImhyIjpmYWxzZX0.TGCS6pTzjrs3nmALSOS7yiLO9Bh9fxzDXEDiq1LIYtE"
export DAVID_TOKEN="eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJ1c2VyIjoiZGF2aWQiLCJhenAiOiJkYXZpZCIsInN1Ym9yZGluYXRlcyI6W10sImhyIjp0cnVlfQ.Q6EiWzU1wx1g6sdWQ1r4bxT1JgSHUpVXpINMqMaUDMU"

These tokens encode the same information as the policies we did before (bob is alice’s manager, betty is charlie’s, david is the only HR member, etc). If you want to inspect their contents, start up the OPA REPL and execute io.jwt.decode(<token here>, [header, payload, signature]) or open the example above in the Playground.

Let’s try a few queries (note: you may need to escape the ? characters in the queries for your shell):

Check that charlie can’t see bob’s salary.

curl --user charlie:password "localhost:5000/finance/salary/bob?token=$CHARLIE_TOKEN"

Check that charlie can’t pretend to be bob to see alice’s salary.

curl --user charlie:password "localhost:5000/finance/salary/alice?token=$BOB_TOKEN"

Check that david can see betty’s salary.

curl --user david:password "localhost:5000/finance/salary/betty?token=$DAVID_TOKEN"

Check that bob can see alice’s salary.

Check that alice can see her own salary.

curl --user alice:password "localhost:5000/finance/salary/alice?token=$ALICE_TOKEN"

Congratulations for finishing the tutorial!

• OPA gives you fine-grained policy control over APIs once you set up the server to ask OPA for authorization.
• You write allow/deny policies to control which APIs can be executed by whom.
• You can use OPA data structures to define abstractions over your data.

The code for this tutorial can be found in the open-policy-agent/contrib repository.