Part 4: Example main application implementation

Previous part: Third-party API implementation

The main app in our scenario is a simple Flask app that's deployed to Azure App Service. The app provides a public API endpoint named /api/v1/getcode, which generates a code for some other purpose in the app (for example, with two-factor authentication for human users). The main app also provides a simple home page that displays a link to the API endpoint.

The sample's provisioning script performs the following steps:

1. Create the App Service host and deploy the code with the Azure CLI command, az webapp up.

2. Create an Azure Storage account for the main app (using az storage account create).

3. Create a Queue in the storage account named "code-requests" (using az storage queue create).

4. To ensure that the app is allowed to write to the queue, use az role assignment create to assign the "Storage Queue Data Contributor" role to the app. For more information about roles, see How to assign role permissions using the Azure CLI.

The main app code is as follows; explanations of important details are given in the next parts of this series.

from flask import Flask, request, jsonify
import requests, random, string, os
from datetime import datetime
from azure.keyvault.secrets import SecretClient
from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.storage.queue import QueueClient

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config["DEBUG"] = True

number_url = os.environ["THIRD_PARTY_API_ENDPOINT"]

# Authenticate with Azure. First, obtain the DefaultAzureCredential
credential = DefaultAzureCredential()

# Next, get the client for the Key Vault. You must have first enabled managed identity
# on the App Service for the credential to authenticate with Key Vault.
key_vault_url = os.environ["KEY_VAULT_URL"]
keyvault_client = SecretClient(vault_url=key_vault_url, credential=credential)

# Obtain the secret: for this step to work you must add the app's service principal to
# the key vault's access policies for secret management.
api_secret_name = os.environ["THIRD_PARTY_API_SECRET_NAME"]
vault_secret = keyvault_client.get_secret(api_secret_name)

# The "secret" from Key Vault is an object with multiple properties. The key we
# want for the third-party API is in the value property. 
access_key = vault_secret.value

# Set up the Storage queue client to which we write messages
queue_url = os.environ["STORAGE_QUEUE_URL"]
queue_client = QueueClient.from_queue_url(queue_url=queue_url, credential=credential)


@app.route('/', methods=['GET'])
def home():
    return f'Home page of the main app. Make a request to <a href="./api/v1/getcode">/api/v1/getcode</a>.'


def random_char(num):
       return ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for x in range(num))


@app.route('/api/v1/getcode', methods=['GET'])
def get_code():
    headers = {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'x-functions-key': access_key
        }

    r = requests.get(url = number_url, headers = headers)
    
    if (r.status_code != 200):       
        return "Could not get you a code.", r.status_code

    data = r.json()
    chars1 = random_char(3)
    chars2 = random_char(3)
    code_value = f"{chars1}-{data['value']}-{chars2}"
    code = { "code": code_value, "timestamp" : str(datetime.utcnow()) }

    # Log a queue message with the code for, say, a process that invalidates
    # the code after a certain period of time.
    queue_client.send_message(code)

    return jsonify(code)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()

Part 5 - Dependencies and environment variables >>>