Document advising against publicly exposing the Admin API and provide a usage example (#13231)

* Admin API request explanation improved

Pointed out, that the Admin API is not accessible by default from any remote computer, but only from the PC `matrix-synapse` is running on.
Added a full, working example, making sure to include the cURL flag `-X`, which needs to be prepended to `GET`, `POST`, `PUT` etc. and listing the full query string including protocol, IP address and port.

* Admin API request explanation improved

* Apply suggestions from code review

Update changelog. Reword prose.

Co-authored-by: David Robertson <david.m.robertson1@gmail.com>
1.103.0-whithout-watcha
jejo86 2 years ago committed by GitHub
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  1. 1
      changelog.d/13231.doc
  2. 17
      docs/usage/administration/admin_api/README.md

@ -0,0 +1 @@
Provide an example of using the Admin API. Contributed by @jejo86.

@ -18,6 +18,11 @@ already on your `$PATH` depending on how Synapse was installed.
Finding your user's `access_token` is client-dependent, but will usually be shown in the client's settings.
## Making an Admin API request
For security reasons, we [recommend](reverse_proxy.md#synapse-administration-endpoints)
that the Admin API (`/_synapse/admin/...`) should be hidden from public view using a
reverse proxy. This means you should typically query the Admin API from a terminal on
the machine which runs Synapse.
Once you have your `access_token`, you will need to authenticate each request to an Admin API endpoint by
providing the token as either a query parameter or a request header. To add it as a request header in cURL:
@ -25,5 +30,17 @@ providing the token as either a query parameter or a request header. To add it a
curl --header "Authorization: Bearer <access_token>" <the_rest_of_your_API_request>
```
For example, suppose we want to
[query the account](user_admin_api.md#query-user-account) of the user
`@foo:bar.com`. We need an admin access token (e.g.
`syt_AjfVef2_L33JNpafeif_0feKJfeaf0CQpoZk`), and we need to know which port
Synapse's [`client` listener](config_documentation.md#listeners) is listening
on (e.g. `8008`). Then we can use the following command to request the account
information from the Admin API.
```sh
curl --header "Authorization: Bearer syt_AjfVef2_L33JNpafeif_0feKJfeaf0CQpoZk" -X GET http://127.0.0.1:8008/_synapse/admin/v2/users/@foo:bar.com
```
For more details on access tokens in Matrix, please refer to the complete
[matrix spec documentation](https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.1#using-access-tokens).

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