Bypassing Hasura's Auth for Remote Schemas

Introduction

It might be necessary sometimes to bypass Hasura's authentication system (calling the configured webhook, or validating the JWT), for requests that are for a remote GraphQL server.

For example, you have a remote GraphQL server which does authentication, i.e. signup and login, and you have added it as a Remote Schema. In this case, you would not want to perform Hasura's authorization when the user is making a login/signup request.

There is no first-class option to currently do this via any configuration in Hasura. However a similar solution can be achieved by the following workarounds:

Bypassing webhook authentication

If you have a webhook authorization setup, in the normal scenario, your authorization webhook would return 200 on success and 401 if it is either unable to authorize the current request or if the authorization information is absent (like cookie, authorization header etc.)

To bypass the webhook auth:

• the webhook should respond with 200 and x-hasura-role: anonymous instead of a 401 when the authorization information is absent or if it fails to resolve the authorization information.
• when adding the Remote Schema, check the Forward all headers from client option so that the remote server will get the relevant cookie/header (from the client) and the role anonymous.

Bypassing JWT authentication

If you have a JWT authorization setup, to bypass the JWT auth:

• your authentication server should generate a static JWT token for anonymous i.e. unauthenticated users.
• when adding the Remote Schema, check the Forward all headers from client option so that the remote server will get the JWT (from the client).

For example, the generated JWT can be:

{
  "sub": "0000000000",
  "iat": 1516239022,
  "role": "anonymous",
  "https://hasura.io/jwt/claims": {
    "x-hasura-allowed-roles": ["anonymous"],
    "x-hasura-default-role": "anonymous"
  }
}

Hasura will get this JWT and successfully validate it. When your remote server receives this JWT, it should specifically validate the JWT and, for example, check for the role key in the JWT. If it is set to anonymous, then it should consider the request as unauthenticated.

Additional Resources

Data Federation with Hasura - Watch Webinar.