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Comment by arohner | Hacker News Reader

Step 1) document the endpoints enough that outside developers can write their own clients.

It took quite a bit of work for me to get a native Clojure client working to connect to the google cloud SDK. That was after wrestling with jar-hell around gRPC and calling the Java client from clojure, which is decidedly not pretty.

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For future reference, here's the HTTP/REST documentation for the Cloud APIs: https://cloud.google.com/apis/docs/overview

E.g. for the GKE API: https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/reference/rest/

(For people that rather use an existing library, this lets you pick one of 7 languages and start from there: https://cloud.google.com/docs/ )

Yes, but that doesn't deal with authentication. My problem was getting the JWT stuff working. The solution ended up being: https://gist.github.com/arohner/8d94ee5704b1c0c1b206186525d9...

Ah, yeah, coding the OAuth2 flow in a new language (vs using an existing library) is tricky, at the very least because OAuth2 itself is complex. The best docs I know for that are here https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2Servi... (we should link to it from the docs of the Cloud APIs).

From a glimpse, what's said there matches what your code is doing, so thanks a lot for sharing it!

In these situations the best thing you can do is man-in-the-middle the HTTP requests from an existing client.

That said, I've only ever had to do this when reversing private mobile API's. I can't believe a REST API from Google would be missing documentation of the raw HTTP endpoints?! That should be the first documentation of an API, before that of any specific client implementations.

Or get a pre-existing client for a non-compiled language. Chances are there's a Python/PHP/Ruby/Perl implementation, and those shouldn't be hard to pick apart.

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