How-To: Selectively enable Dapr APIs on the Dapr sidecar

In certain scenarios such as zero trust networks or when exposing the Dapr sidecar to external traffic through a frontend, it’s recommended to only enable the Dapr sidecar APIs that are being used by the app. Doing so reduces the attack surface and helps keep the Dapr APIs scoped to the actual needs of the application.

Dapr allows developers to control which APIs are accessible to the application by setting an API allow list using a Dapr Configuration.

Default behavior

If an API allow list section is not specified, the default behavior is to allow access to all Dapr APIs. Once an allow list is set, only the specified APIs are accessible.

For example, the following configuration enables all APIs for both HTTP and gRPC:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Configuration
metadata:
  name: myappconfig
  namespace: default
spec:
  tracing:
    samplingRate: "1"

Enabling specific HTTP APIs

The following example enables the state v1.0 HTTP API and block all the rest:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Configuration
metadata:
  name: myappconfig
  namespace: default
spec:
  api:
    allowed:
    - name: state
      version: v1.0
      protocol: http

Enabling specific gRPC APIs

The following example enables the state v1 gRPC API and block all the rest:

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Configuration
metadata:
  name: myappconfig
  namespace: default
spec:
  api:
    allowed:
    - name: state
      version: v1
      protocol: grpc

List of Dapr APIs

The name field takes the name of the Dapr API you would like to enable.

See this list of values corresponding to the different Dapr APIs: