Security¶

Security is an important — and often underestimated — part of API development. This section covers authentication and authorisation patterns for FasterAPI.

Pages¶

Topic	What you learn
OAuth2 with Password + JWT	Bearer tokens, login endpoint, protected routes
OAuth2 Scopes	Fine-grained permission checks
HTTP Basic Auth	Simple username / password authentication

Core concepts¶

Authentication vs authorisation¶

Authentication — verifying who a user is (login, token validation).
Authorisation — verifying what a user may do (role checks, scopes).

Secrets and keys¶

Store secrets in environment variables, never in code or version control.
Use a cryptographically secure random value for SECRET_KEY:

python -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex(32))"

HTTPS¶

Always serve your API over HTTPS in production so credentials are not transmitted in plain text. See Behind a Proxy and Deployment for setup guidance.

Dependency-based security¶

FasterAPI's Depends() system is well-suited for security: declare an auth dependency once and reuse it across many routes.

from FasterAPI import Depends, HTTPException, Header


async def require_auth(authorization: str | None = Header(default=None)):
    if not authorization:
        raise HTTPException(status_code=401, detail="Not authenticated")
    # validate token here
    return parse_token(authorization)

Next steps¶

Start with OAuth2 with Password + JWT for the most common pattern.
For simple internal tools, HTTP Basic Auth may be sufficient.

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