Guardian

Guardian is a on-demand access management tool. It manages resources from various data providers along with the users’ access. Users required to raise an appeal in order to gain access to a particular resource. The appeal will go through several approvals before it is getting approved and granted the access to the user.

Key Features

Provider management: Support various providers (currently only BigQuery, more coming up!) and multiple instances for each provider type
Resource management: Resources from a provider are managed in Guardian's database. There is also an API to update resource's metadata to add additional information.
Appeal-based access: Users are expected to create an appeal for accessing data from registered providers. The appeal will get reviewed by the configured approvers before it gives the access to the user.
Configurable approval flow: Approval flow configures what are needed for an appeal to get approved and who are eligible to approve/reject. It can be configured and linked to a provider so that every appeal created to their resources will follow the procedure in order to get approved.
External identity managers: This gives the flexibility to use any third-party identity manager. User properties.

Documentation

Explore the following resoruces to get started with Guardian:

Guides provides guidance on usage.
Concepts describes all important Guardian concepts including system architecture.
Reference contains details about configurations and other aspects of Guardian.
Contribute contains resources for anyone who wants to contribute to Guardian.

Installation

Install Guardian on macOS, Windows, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and on any machine.
Refer this for installations and configurations

Binary (Cross-platform)

Download the appropriate version for your platform from releases page. Once downloaded, the binary can be run from anywhere. You don’t need to install it into a global location. This works well for shared hosts and other systems where you don’t have a privileged account. Ideally, you should install it somewhere in your PATH for easy use. /usr/local/bin is the most probable location.

macOS

guardian is available via a Homebrew Tap, and as downloadable binary from the releases page:

brew install goto/tap/guardian

To upgrade to the latest version:

brew upgrade guardian

Check for installed guardian version

guardian version

Linux

guardian is available as downloadable binaries from the releases page. Download the .deb or .rpm from the releases page and install with sudo dpkg -i and sudo rpm -i respectively.

Windows

guardian is available via scoop, and as a downloadable binary from the releases page:

scoop bucket add guardian https://github.com/goto/scoop-bucket.git

To upgrade to the latest version:

scoop update guardian

Docker

We provide ready to use Docker container images. To pull the latest image:

docker pull gotocompany/guardian:latest

To pull a specific version:

docker pull gotocompany/guardian:v0.3.2

Usage

Guardian is purely API-driven. It is very easy to get started with Guardian. It provides CLI, HTTP and GRPC APIs for simpler developer experience.

CLI

Guardian CLI is fully featured and simple to use, even for those who have very limited experience working from the command line. Run guardian --help to see list of all available commands and instructions to use.

List of commands

guardian --help

Print command reference

guardian reference

API

Guardian provides a fully-featured GRPC and HTTP API to interact with Guardian server. Both APIs adheres to a set of standards that are rigidly followed. Please refer to proton for GRPC API definitions.

Running locally

Dependencies:

- Git
- Go 1.21 or above
- PostgreSQL 13.2 or above

Clone the repo

git clone git@github.com:goto/guardian.git

Install all the golang dependencies

make setup

Build guardian binary file

make build

Init server config. Customise with your local configurations.

make config

Run database migrations

./guardian server migrate -c config.yaml

Start guardian server

./guardian server start -c config.yaml

Initialise client configurations

./guardian config init

Running tests

Running all unit tests

make test

Print code coverage

make coverage

Contribute

Development of Guardian happens in the open on GitHub, and we are grateful to the community for contributing bugfixes and improvements. Read below to learn how you can take part in improving Guardian.

Read our contributing guide to learn about our development process, how to propose bugfixes and improvements, and how to build and test your changes to Guardian.

To help you get your feet wet and get you familiar with our contribution process, we have a list of good first issues that contain bugs which have a relatively limited scope. This is a great place to get started.

This project exists thanks to all the contributors.

License

Guardian is Apache 2.0 licensed.