Flutter — Microsoft API Management secured with AD — Hosted API

This is the seventh part of a mini series to show how to secure your Flutter applications using Microsoft technologies:

1. Web API — Setting up your Web API with Visual Studio.
2. APIM Service — Creating an API management service in Azure.
3. Secure Gateway — Securing requests through the API gateway.
4. MSAL — Authenticating your Flutter app on iOS.
5. MSAL — Authenticating your Flutter app on Android.
6. MSAL — Authenticating your Flutter app on the Web.
7. Hosted API — Hosting your Web API’s in Azure.
8. Secure Hosted API — Secure requests with the APIM Gateway

In the the 7th part on securing your application with MS tech we look at a quick and easy way to host your API’s in Azure with API App service.

I choose it because of the extra out of the box features it has to manage and work with API’s.

App Service not only adds the power of Microsoft Azure to your application, such as security, load balancing, autoscaling, and automated management. You can also take advantage of its DevOps capabilities, such as continuous deployment from Azure DevOps, GitHub, Docker Hub, and other sources, package management, staging environments, custom domain, and TLS/SSL certificates.

Learn Microsoft: App Service overview

I started by revamping the API a little, the Recipes API was too narrow and would result in too may API’s this is now the Digests API with Recipes been one of the digests.

Then I create the Azure API App service:

And configured the deployment to deploy the new Digests API.

You can find details on the setup in the XP section below.

Ta Da

XP

API Revamp

I rebuilt the recipes API on Visual Studio for the Mac to show the flexibility we now have with .Net:

Select new project from the start screen or the file menu:

Click create and your project is created:

Then add the Swashbuckle annotations package:

And it gets downloaded and added to the project:

And replace the code in program.cs with this:

using Microsoft.OpenApi.Models;
using Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Annotations;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

// Add services to the container.

builder.Services.AddEndpointsApiExplorer();

// Learn more about configuring Swagger/OpenAPI at https://aka.ms/aspnetcore/swashbuckle
builder.Services.AddSwaggerGen(options =>
{
    options.SwaggerDoc("v1", new OpenApiInfo
    {
        Description = "A collection of digests e.g. recipes",
        Title = "Digests Api",
        Version = "v1"
    });
    options.EnableAnnotations();
});

var app = builder.Build();

// Configure the HTTP request pipeline.

if (app.Environment.IsDevelopment())
{
    app.UseSwagger();
    app.UseSwaggerUI(c =>
    {
        c.SwaggerEndpoint("/swagger/v1/swagger.json", "Digests API v1");
    });
}

app.UseHttpsRedirection();

// Recipes API

app.MapGet("/digests/recipes", [SwaggerOperation(summary: "List Recipes.", description: "Gets a list of all Recipes.")] () =>
{
    var recipes = new Recipe[]
    {
            new Recipe(
                "How to boil an egg",
                "https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/11/how-to-boil-an-egg-the-heston-blumenthal-way",
                "Heston Blumenthal",
                TimeSpan.FromSeconds(630),
                "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/11/5/1415205733799/4bfbd71a-6cd0-4494-833f-eaaed20a15b3-1020x612.jpeg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=ca3a95d7e761d267eff1b79b58cc4849" )
    };
    return recipes;
})
    .WithName("GetRecipes")
    .WithTags("Recipes");

app.Run();

internal record Recipe(string Title, string RecipeLink, string Author, TimeSpan Duration, string Thumbnail)
{
}

That’s it, just run it to check it opens in the browser and works.

Creating an API App in Azure UI

In your Azure portal search for and create your new service.

Add API to source control (git)

Move the API source code into it, check it in and upload the changes:

git add .
git commit -m"Digests API"
git push origin

Setup Deployment in the API App

Deploy the new API in Azure API App

Now you can use sync to publish the API from BitBucket:

BackBurner

More work on CI/CD to automate integration and deployment when PR’s are accepted.

Links

• API Apps
• App Service overview