Server Authentication Service

Feature Requests
1

From Authorisation — Anvil Extras documentation

@anvil.server.callable
@authentication_required
def sensitive_server_function():
  do_stuff()

This is great, but I feel like this should be baked into anvil by default with the option to opt out of requiring authentication.

For most professional apps I’m going to build, I want the backend server functions to require authentication, with authentication opt-out decorators. So the above code would look this, with the Authentication Service turned ON:

@anvil.server.callable
def sensitive_server_function():
  do_stuff()

The @authentication_required decorator is not required, but provides the same functionality as if it were explicitly provided.

The way the opt-out decorators would look with the Authentication Service turned ON would be something like:

@anvil.server.callable
@authentication_not_required
def non_sensitive_server_function():
  do_stuff()
2

Not sure if this checks all of the needs you’re looking for…BUT

anvil.server.callable has an argument that can be toggled on.

I use the following statement.
authenticated_callable = anvil.server.callable(require_user=True)

You could set it to some flag that is toggled by some method.

See related docs

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3

For apps which use the Users service, it makes sense to default to authentication ON.

For apps which don’t? To me, the sensible default in that case whould be OFF.

2 Likes
4

To be safe, you could even remove the import anvil.server line from the top of your server modules and instead only from ./utils import authenticated_callable (after putting it in a separate, custom utils module). You could even name it callable (that is, treat authenticated as the default) and have a separate unauthenticated_callable decorator.

p.s. If you wanted to combine anvil.server.callable with the more advanced functionality of the anvil_extras Authorisation module, you could create a new decorator that combines the two decorators like this: Can I combine two decorators into a single one in Python? - Stack Overflow

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