Create a Python Code Bundle

Introduction

This page demonstrates how to create a Python code bundle as part of the custom authentication process for Tyk Cloud, so that you can ensure your API management solution is as effective as possible.

What do I need to do to create my Plugin?

• You need to create the Python code bundle on your locally installed Gateway (not an Tyk Cloud Cloud Data Plane stack).
• You will create 2 files, a manifest file (manifest.json) and the python file (middleware.py)
• You then create a zipped bundle via our Tyk CLI tool that is built in to your local Gateway instance.

Creating the Plugin bundle

Step 1: Create your working directory

The first step is to create a directory for your plugin bundle files:

mkdir ~/my-tyk-plugin
cd ~/my-tyk-plugin

Step 2: Creating the Manifest File

The manifest file contains information about your plugin file structure and how we expect it to interact with the API that will load it. This file should be named manifest.json and needs to have the following contents:

{
  "custom_middleware": {
    "auth_check": {
      "name": "MyAuthMiddleware"
    },
    "pre": [
      {
        "name": "MyAuthMiddleware"
      }
    ],
    "driver": "python"
  },
  "file_list": [
    "middleware.py"
  ]
}

File description

Step 3: Creating the middleware.py file

• You import decorators from the Tyk module that gives us the Hook decorator, and we import Tyk Python API helpers

• You implement a middleware function and register it as a hook. The input includes the request object, the session object, the API meta data and its specification. The hook checks the authorization header for a specified value. In this tutorial we have called it Authorization.

from tyk.decorators import *
from gateway import TykGateway as tyk

@Hook
def MyAuthMiddleware(request, session, metadata, spec):
    auth = request.get_header('Authorization')
    if not auth:
        auth = request.object.params.get('authorization', None)

    if auth == '47a0c79c427728b3df4af62b9228c8ae':
        session.rate = 1000.0
        session.per = 1.0
        metadata["token"] = auth
    return request, session, metadata

@Hook
def MyPostMiddleware(request, session, spec):
    tyk.log("This is my post middleware", "info")
    request.object.set_headers["x-tyk-request"] = "something"
    return request, session

File description

Step 4: Create the Plugin Bundle

• You create a bundle to cater for a number of plugins connected to the one API, and using a bundle makes this more manageable.

• To bundle your plugin we run the following command in your working directory where your manifest.json and plugin code is.

docker run \
  --rm \
  -v $(pwd):/cloudplugin \
  --entrypoint "/bin/sh" -it \
  -w "/cloudplugin" \
  tykio/tyk-gateway:v3.1.2 \
  -c '/opt/tyk-gateway/tyk bundle build -y'

• A plugin bundle is a packaged version of the plugin, it may also contain a cryptographic signature of its contents. The -y flag tells the Tyk CLI tool to skip the signing process in order to simplify this tutorial. For more information on the Tyk CLI tool, see here.
• You should now have a bundle.zip file in the plugin working directory.
• Next you will configure uploading your plugin bundle file to your Amazon S3 bucket.