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Users and groups

Introduction

Sheetlabs supports different levels of user access and role-based access control. This allows you to fulfil use cases like:

  • Allowing only specified users to access certain APIs;
  • Allowing different teams to manage only the data tables and APIs that they responsible for; and
  • Allowing anyone to access your API without authentication.

Users

Sheetlabs supports three different types of users:

  • Administrators: These users can manage all data tables, create and edit APIs, manage other users in the organisation and use any API.
  • Editors: Can manage data tables and APIs that are within the same group as the user. See more below about groups.
  • Users: Regular users can consume the APIs within their organisation. But they have no visibility of the data tables, other users in the organisation, or anything else.

To create a new user, click Users on the menu bar and then Create User. Enter the required details and click Create User to finish the process. Take care to select the appropriate role for the user in question; this can be Administrator or User.

If you are creating a user on behalf of someone, you can check the box to email a copy of the users account details to the user’s registered email address.

Groups

A user can be assigned to one or more groups. You might model these around teams within your organisation. Or perhaps you might create groups for your customer accounts.

When creating a data table, you will also be asked to assign it to a group. This is used to provide group-based access control later on.

Groups can be used to control access to resources. The Editor user type works hand in hand with groups. An Editor can manage data tables and APIs within the same group, but has no management abilities for other groups.

Access levels for consuming APIs

You can make your APIs available to the world without authentication, or you can lock it down to users within your organisation, or you can specify individual users that you'd like to access it. Read more about the different options available.

Authentication tokens

Sheetlabs uses tokens to control access to APIs. These can be used in place of your password when accessing APIs.

For example:

$ curl -s -u "user@domain.com:t_085bb5a1ba872f97476f4b3c95955c1a" https://api.sheetlabs.com/ACME/getDomain
  [
    {
        "rank": 1,
        "date": "1985-03-15T00:00:00+00:00",
        "domain": "symbolics.com",
        "registeredto": "Symbolics"
    },
    {
        "rank": 2,
        "date": "1985-04-24T00:00:00+00:00",
        "domain": "bbn.com",
        "registeredto": "BBN Technologies"
    },
    {
        "rank": 3,
        "date": "1985-05-24T00:00:00+00:00",
        "domain": "think.com",
        "registeredto": "Thinking Machines"
    }
]

To view your current API auth token, click Account on the menu bar, and then My Account. An API auth token will look something like t_3203b31b16df39c43f6a90d670f01f0e.

You can generate a new API auth token at any point. This will invalidate your existing auth token, but will have no effect on your account’s password.