This is an API gateway server for the boardgamegeek.com XML API 2.
It serves several purposes:
- It conceals the required application bearer token to access the BGG API
- It authenticates use of the gateway to control for rate limits
- It translates the XML responses of the BGG API into JSON
- It caches data received from the API, as I understand it from the BGG usage guides.
- It shares that caching, so that several apps can use the gateway and reduce their impact.
If that's of interest to you, read on for the caveats.
So far,
I've built out the endpoints that are of interest to me.
That's meant the search and thing endpoints.
I will likely want to get the geeklist from
the old v1 XML API,
and maybe a few others.
At present, forum threads hold little interest.
Adding endpoints isn't terribly difficult, and I might be willing to do that, or accept PRs with new endpoints added.
Requests are authenticated by a biscuit that contains a user assertion. Any user will do, but the biscuit needs to be issued by a trusted authority. In other words, this gateway is intended to be used as a part of an ecosystem of apps authenticated by biscuits. The upstream authorizer has to expose its public key by way of Biscuit Well-known Key Sets, and the API has a configuration for mapping the Host headers on requests to itself to upstream authorities.
If all of that sounds like gobbledeygook, one of two things are true: this project might not be of use to you, or you've just discovered a brand new computer security rabbithole to dive into.
The license for this project is the MPL-2.0 license. In addition, please let me know that you're using it. The long and the short of it is that I just want to know if what I've been doing is useful to someone else.
If you can compile the server application in the first place,
simply running at the command line with a --help flag
will describe its configuration flags
and the environment variables it'll pull from without them.
For further explainations, please reach out. I'd be happy to expand this documentation given that there's an audience.