Is There a Video Tutorial for Understanding Pipedream's External Authentication?

1

This topic was automatically generated from Slack. You can find the original thread here.

having trouble wrapping my head around Passing external credentials at runtime - Pipedream, is there a video yet?

2

good find. Not yet, brand new feature we worked on as part of a hack day.

A lot of our customers already manage auth for their users and store access tokens in their own DB. They want to run workflows on behalf of each of those users.

Before, you could only connect accounts from the Pipedream UI, so every auth had to be tied to a Pipedream user with a PD login. Now, you can pass any auth via props, just like any other value, so you can retrieve auth dynamically (like from your DB) and pass it here, running one workflow for any number of your own end users.

Does that help?

3

ok. but this would not be - i want to build oauth flows on PD so i could do things like, hit Google Photos with a user’s credentials

4

so we are about to ship something related to that: you can manage OAuth + run workflows for any end user

5

i could have sworn i had filed a bug on that, and it was closed as done and it linked to this :slightly_smiling_face: maybe i misread

6

found it - [FEATURE] I want to use Pipedream's built-in triggers and actions with my own OAuth Access Tokens · Issue #5054 · PipedreamHQ/pipedream · GitHub

7

(and it wasnt me who filed it)

8

can you tell me more about exactly what you want to do for the Google Photos app?

9

brb running to a meeting

10

that was just a random example :slightly_smiling_face:

11

np

12

ok. but this would not be - i want to build oauth flows on PD so i could do things like, hit Google Photos with a user’s credentials
This actually is exactly that. Here you need to “bring your own tokens” — the expectation is that you already manage OAuth with Google Photos on your site as a part of your signup process or something, and store those tokens in some database in your app. This feature lets you use those tokens for any of your end users to run Pipedream workflows.

13

We’re also working on a way to let you manage OAuth + store user-specific credentials on Pipedream, then let you reference them in the same way. So when you handle the OAuth flow for Google Photos on your site, Pipedream would still manage the token refresh / all the OAuth process for you. Then you’d be able to reference those tokens in workflows, as well.

14

So with the feature as it’s built now, we let you “bring your own tokens” for your end users and assume you have a process to handle that, which some of our customers do.

But soon you’ll be able to manage everything on Pipedream — handle all OAuth for your end users, run workflows for any of them

15

this sounds pretty dang cool - thank you

16

would we need to ship that second part for you to consider building random apps like that Google Photos one? Then you could ship apps without people needing to sign up for Pipedream at all. You’d just create one workflow template, set up some signup process on your site, users do OAuth / select a photo library / etc. , and the workflow would just run on their behalf. So essentially lets you build full apps on PD

17

curious if you have any places where you’d use this, too

18

thats kinda what i was thinking. honestly, i think this occurred to me so long ago i was considering a Twitter API thing but… yeah

19

gotcha cool, we’ll definitely keep you updated — we’ll be sharing more on this one soon

20

Can’t think of a use case for this on our side right now. :thinking_face:

All of our workflows are internal and don’t really require any individual user credentials.

But I’ll keep this is mind! Might come in handy some day. :+1: