Checking if a token is valid

Support
1

I have a backend websocket server that only wants to start expensive operations of a request has a valid user session token from girder.
My backend server expects to have a girder API url that returns success if the token is ok and failure if it is not valid.

I only found:

api/v1/token/current

and

api/v1/user/me

which both return a JSON response if the passed token is valid. BUT, in case of an error, they only return a “null” JSON. Of course I could change the backend server to look for a response != null,
but to me it would make more sense to return an HTTP error code, which is more failsafe to check than a JSON. (The backend uses the token check not only with girder, so an error code works better for any token check API).
I there something I have overlooked?

2

In fact, any endpoint decorated with @access.user will provide the behavior you want. You could add a trivial endpoint via a plugin that would do that:

@access.user
def validate_user(**kw):
    pass

That would yield a 200 response if the token is valid, and a 401 if not.

3

Thanks! I found that the api_key/listKeys has such a decorator, so I can use it (although this transfers the list of api keys which I don‘t need).

Would you mind adding such a validate route to the user.py api?
I know it is easy to add own extensions, but it is simpler to just use the official girder container.

An alternative would be a token/validate with public access and token as parameter?

4

Since it’s a small amount of code, I’d say it’s worth putting in a PR for such a core endpoint, though I can’t speak for how everyone would feel about it. I’d personally be OK with it.