How to Write Middleware using FastAPI

For one of my project, I needed to host an API service on the RapidAPI platform. In order to make sure that all the requests to the application are routed via RapidAPI I needed to check special header sent by RapidAPI.

RapidAPI forwards each valid request to the configured server, but injects additional header X-RapidAPI-Proxy-Secret. While a hacker may also send the same header, the value of this header will be only known to RapidAPI platform and your app.

I deployed the server on heroku, and defined an environment variable
PROXY_SECRET which I check against the one sent with the request.

Sometimes I need to test the server directly, in which case I simply do not set this variable (like on my local machine) and this check is bypassed.

Code

import os
from starlette.requests import Request
from starlette.responses import PlainTextResponse

app = FastAPI()

@app.middleware("http")
async def check_rapidAPI_proxy_header(request: Request, call_next):
    # Check if server knows about valid "secret"
    secret_header = os.environ.get("PROXY_SECRET", None)
    if secret_header:
        headers = request.headers
        # If the header is missing, or does not match expected value
        # Reject the request altogether
        if (
            "X-RapidAPI-Proxy-Secret" not in headers
            or headers["X-RapidAPI-Proxy-Secret"] != secret_header
        ):
            return PlainTextResponse(
                "Direct access to the API not allowed", status_code=403
            )

    response = await call_next(request)
    return response

Resources

• Uvcorn's ProxyMiddleWare - This is related but was not directly useful for me.
• FastAPI middleware documentation
• RapidAPI Proxy Secret