Make it easier for a user of the API to add members to groups

At this time the Vinyl API expects a user to pass in ids to the member and admin fields.

{
  "name": "some-group",
  "email": "[e-mail]",
  "description": "an example group", 
  "members": [
    {
      "id": "2764183c-5e75-4ae6-8833-503cd5f4dcb0"
    }
  ],
  "admins": [
    {
      "id": "2764183c-5e75-4ae6-8833-503cd5f4dcb0"
    }
  ]
}

When using the API there doesn’t seem to be a way to look up users like you can with the portal. Its not possible for me to get the ID for Alice so I can send her ID in the payload. I can grab IDs from the browser traffic but that’s not API friendly.

2 solutions I have in mind are:

• expose an api endpoint to look up users by name. I can then get their id and use it to create groups.

/api/users/lookupuser/alice100

• change the group create payload to accept name instead of id . When you receive the name you could do a look up behind the scenes like the portal

{
  "name": "some-group",
  "email": "[e-mail]",
  "description": "an example group", 
  "members": [
    {
      "id": "alice100"
    }
  ],
  "admins": [
    {
      "id": "alice100"
    }
  ]
}

[remerle]

@pauljamescleary this is adding the reverse lookup username->id. This can, and probably should, be done together with #930.

I was hesitant with this one because it allows for discovering which users exist in the system. However, since this is behind auth, that discovery is possible already through the portal. We need to be sure, though, that we only expose the id. I don’t want to leak any info about the user other than the fact that their username has an id in VinylDNS.

[remerle]

This goes hand-in-hand with #930. I think we should provide an endpoint that simply returns the ID of a user given the username. We already support adding any user to a group by username in the portal.

Similar to #930, we should have an endpoint GET /users/<username> which returns id and username.

{
  "id": "<user_id>",
  "username": "<username>"
}