Personal Access Tokens

Personal Access Token (PAT) are a convenient way to access Cells APIs without going through the standard OAuth authentication procedure. They can be used in replacement to the Access Token generated by OAuth and passed via the Authorization: Bearer header. For APIs based on Basic Authentication like WebDAV or SFTP, they can be used as a replacement to the user password (use Username/PersonalToken combination).

PAT can be generated by administrators for a given user with either a fixed expiration date, or an "auto-refresh" sliding window to refresh expiration time at each usage (see below).

[Ent] PAT Management in People administration panel

In Cells Enterprise, PATs can be management directly via the users' edition panel. Browse to Cells Console >> People >> (edit a user) >> Personal Access Tokens.

You can view the status or/and remove a personal access token from this interface.

To create a new token, hit the + button and start creating a personal access token.

Give a friendly name to this token. For Expiration Model, select one of the 2 modes. - Hard Limit: the token will be expired after the set time. - Auto Refresh: the token will be renewed if used before the set time.

[Home] Generating PAT with the command line

Available on Cells Home (and Cells Ent as well), you can generate a personal access token by using the ./cells admin user token command.

Below is the command usage description, you can find the "--expire" and "--auto" flags corresponding to the Hard Limit and Auto Refresh expiration models described above.

TOKEN USAGE

  These token can be used in replacement of an OAuth2-based access token : they can replace the "Bearer" access
  token when calling any REST API. They can also be used as the password (in conjunction with username) for all
  basic-auth based APIs (e.g. webDAV).

TOKEN SCOPE

  By default, generated tokens grant the same level of access as a standard login operation. To improve security,
  it is possible to restrict these accesses to a specific file or folder (given it is accessible by the user in
  first place) with a "scope" in the format "node:NODE_UUID:PERMISSION" where PERMISSION string contains either "r"
  (read) or "w" (write) or both.

Usage:
  ./cells admin user token [flags]

Flags:
  -a, --auto string     Auto-refresh (number of seconds, see help)
  -e, --expire string   Expire after duration, format is 20u where u is a unit: s (second), (minute), h (hour), d(day).
  -h, --help            help for token
  -q, --quiet           Only return the newly created token value (typically useful in automation scripts with a short expiry time)
  -s, --scope strings   Optional scopes
  -u, --user string     User login (mandatory)