{"id":575,"date":"2017-12-13T19:15:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T11:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/?p=575"},"modified":"2018-11-17T22:05:49","modified_gmt":"2018-11-17T14:05:49","slug":"how-to-construct-a-http-request-to-an-endpoint-with-http-basic-authentication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techcoil.com\/blog\/how-to-construct-a-http-request-to-an-endpoint-with-http-basic-authentication\/","title":{"rendered":"How to construct a HTTP request to an endpoint with HTTP Basic Authentication"},"content":{"rendered":"

The HTTP basic authentication is a mechanism commonly used by web servers to authenticate the sender of a HTTP request. Such a mechanism is usually used to guard server endpoints that are meant to be accessed programmatically.<\/p>\n

Almost every new project that I got my hands on required me to create client side coding for accessing server endpoints that use HTTP basic authentication for authenticating the HTTP request sender.<\/p>\n

To have a quick reference on how to construct a HTTP request to an endpoint with HTTP basic authentication, I created this post to as a documentation. The steps are agnostic to any programming languages.<\/p>\n

Generating the HTTP Basic Authentication string payload from a username and password pair<\/h2>\n

The first step to constructing the HTTP request to an endpoint with HTTP basic authentication is to generate a string payload from a username and password pair.<\/p>\n

Assuming that we have the username and password in the variables username<\/code> and password<\/code>, we typically go through the following steps to produce the string payload<\/code>: <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Concatenate username and password with a colon in between:\n
    \r\nucolonp = username + ':' + password\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/li>\n
  2. Convert ucolonp<\/code> to base 64 encoding format and prepend the result with the string 'Basic ':\n
    \r\npayload = 'Basic ' + base64encode(ucolonp)\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    Alternatively, we can collapse the above steps into the following code execution:<\/p>\n
    \r\npayload = 'Basic ' + base64encode(username + ':' + password)\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Most programming languages included some library functions to help us with encoding a string in Base64 format. You should replace base64encode<\/code> with the respective library function call in the programming language of your choice.<\/p>\n
    Appending the HTTP Basic Authentication string payload as a HTTP header in the HTTP request<\/h2>\n
    Once you have the Base64 encoded string payload, the last step will be to include it as a HTTP header in the HTTP request that you are going to send to the server. The HTTP header starts with the string \"Authorization: \" followed by the payload that we had generated earlier.<\/p>\n
    Typically, the HTTP header is included as a key value pair to a function call, with the string \"Authorization\" as the key and the base 64 encoded string payload as the value. In such a case, the colon is usually omitted:<\/p>\n
    \r\nhttpRequest.addHeader('Authorization', payload)\r\n<\/pre>\n
    You should replace the httpRequest.addHeader<\/code> with the respective library function call in the programming language of your choice.<\/p>\n\n