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Managing Groups

Devices can be divided in groups to provide group-specific access to the APIs.

The examples below will use astartectl but you can achieve the same results using AppEngine API.

Reserved group prefixes​

Some prefixes are reserved for internal use. It's not possible to create groups with a name starting with the ~ and @ characters.

Creating a group​

You can create a group with astartectl with this command

astartectl appengine groups create mygroup <device_identifier>,<device_identifier>

device_identifier can be a Device ID or an Alias, and you can put multiple devices by separating them with a comma.

You can check the group was created by listing groups in your realm

astartectl appengine groups list

Adding or removing a device to/from a group​

Once you created a group, you can add or remove devices from it.

To add a device, use:

astartectl appengine groups devices add <device_identifier>

To remove a device, use:

astartectl appengine groups devices remove <device_identifier>

Keep in mind that a group exists as long as it has at least one device in it, so if you remove the last device from a group, the group will cease to exist.

You can always check which devices are in a group with:

astartectl appengine groups devices list

Accessing Devices in a group with Astarte AppEngine API​

Once a device is in a group, you can access to its data on this URL:

https://<astarte-api>/appengine/v1/groups/<group_name>/devices/<device_id>

The hierarchy is exactly the same that is found under

https://<astarte-api>/appengine/v1/devices/<device-id>

which is [documented here](https://docs.astarte-platform.org/astarte/latest/api/index.html?urls.primaryName=AppEngine API#/), but this makes it possible to emit a JWT that only allows access to devices belonging to a specific group.