John Davidson

Message:

Question

I got a question about security. I am building a mobile webshop in Flutter. Is it bad to make those API calls in the frontend? Should I make a separate backend for it in Node for example?

I have also read that you can 'create' your own endpoints in WordPress with PHP. What about that? Does that make it any safer or not?

What endpoints do I use?

There is an existing WooCommerce API to retrieve products, get categories, and create orders on the WooCommerce API. On the CoCart API, you can retrieve the cart, add to the cart, delete the cart, etc...

For the Mollie payment APIs, I think it is better to make a backend.

My take on it

I think it is fine to call those endpoints in the front end. I have seen Flutter packages for WooCommerce to call those endpoints. Yes, I do send the basic auth in the headers... so I am not sure how 'dangerous' that is.

But on the other side. What can the 'hacker' do? They can see all the products, that is fine I guess. I am not sure if they can create orders... They cannot steal money at least :)

Reference code

For reference, here is a piece of code when calling an endpoint:

Future<Product> getProductById(int productId) async {

    String basicAuth =

        'Basic ' + base64Encode(utf8.encode('$username:$password'));

    print(basicAuth);



    var response = await http.get(

        Uri.parse(

            'https://websitename/wp-json/wc/v3/products/${productId}'),

        headers: <String, String>{'Authorization': basicAuth});

    if (response.statusCode == 200) {

      return Product.fromJson(jsonDecode(response.body));

    } else {

      throw Exception('Failed');

    }

  }

Let me know your opinion!

---

My Answer:
fetchData() async {
final response = await http.get(
'https://example.com/wp-json/wc/v3/products',
headers: {
'Authorization': 'Basic ' + base64Encode(utf8.encode('username:password')),
},
);
if (response.statusCode == 200) {
return json.decode(response.body);
} else {
throw Exception('Failed to load data');
}
}