Handling API key authentication

API key authentication is a simple yet effective way to control access to an application. This method involves generating a unique key for each user or service that needs access to your API and requiring that key to be included in the request headers.

API keys can be generated in various ways, depending on the level of security needed.

FastAPI doesn’t have built-in support for API key authentication, but you can easily implement it using dependencies or middleware. A dependency is more flexible for most use cases, so we’ll use that approach.

This recipe will show you a basic, yet not secure, way to implement it.

Getting ready

We will keep working on our application. However, you can apply this recipe to a simple application from scratch as well.

How to do it...

Let’s create an api_key.py module to store the logic to handle API keys. The package will contain the API list and verification method:

from fastapi...