Scope API key to read-only access

Hey Rachel — great question, and honestly this is something we could document better. Short answer: we don't currently support fine-grained scopes on API keys. A key is either valid (full access based on the account's feature tier) or it's not.

The auth model right now is basically:

• Your API key inherits the permissions of the user account that created it
• There's no "read-only" key type or endpoint-level restrictions

That said, for your use case, here are the workarounds I see teams use:

Option 1: Service Account with Restricted User Role

Create a dedicated user account in FieldPulse with the Viewer role (or custom role with "View" permissions only), then generate the API key from that account. The key will still technically be able to call POST/PUT endpoints, but the underlying user permissions will block mutations. You'll get 403s on write attempts, which is ... not elegant, but functional.

Option 2: Reverse Proxy with Request Filtering

Some teams put a lightweight proxy (nginx, AWS API Gateway, etc.) in front of our API that rejects anything except GET requests. Yeah, this is infrastructure you have to maintain, but it gives you surgical control.

What we're actually building

Scoped API keys with explicit read/write and resource-level permissions are on the roadmap for Q1 2026. I can't share the full spec yet, but think along the lines of:

{
  "name": "Data Warehouse Sync",
  "scopes": ["work_orders:read", "customers:read"],
  "allowed_ips": ["10.0.0.0/8"]
}

No promises on exact syntax, but that's the direction.

For now, I'd recommend Option 1 — it's what most of our Enterprise customers do for read-only ETL jobs. Want me to walk through setting up a restricted service account?

Awesome, glad that unblocked you. For the beta — shoot me a DM with your account ID and I'll flag you for the early access list when we start private previews. Probably late Q4 2025.

One heads up: the Viewer role blocking writes is Working As Intended but not officially guaranteed behavior, since the API key itself still has "full" scope in a sense. I wouldn't build critical security logic around it without monitoring. If someone accidentally bumps that service account to Manager, your sync suddenly has write access.

Consider adding a cheap safety check in your Python wrapper — something like:

def validate_read_only(self, method):
    if method != 'GET' and not self.allow_writes:
        raise ValueError(f"Read-only client rejected {method} request")

Defense in depth, etc etc.

Awesome, glad that unblocked you. For the beta — shoot me a DM with your account ID and I'll flag you for the early access list when we start private previews. Probably late Q4 2025.

One heads up: the Viewer role blocking writes is Working As Intended but not officially guaranteed behavior, since the API key itself still has "full" scope in a sense. I wouldn't build critical security logic around it without monitoring. If someone accidentally bumps that service account to Manager, your sync suddenly has write access.

Consider adding a cheap safety check in your Python wrapper — something like:

def validate_read_only(self, method):
    if method != 'GET' and not self.allow_writes:
        raise ValueError(f"Read-only client rejected {method} request")

Defense in depth, etc etc.