How do I make a request using HTTP basic authentic

Question

I'm building a REST web service client in PHP and at the moment I'm using curl to make requests to the service.

How do I use curl to make authenticated (http basic) requests? Do I have to add the headers myself?

Answer 1

Michael Dowling's very actively maintained Guzzle is a good way to go. Apart from the elegant interface, asynchronous calling and PSR compliance, it makes the authentication headers for REST calls dead simple:

// Create a client with a base URL
$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client(['base_url' => 'http://myservices.io']);

// Send a request to http://myservices.io/status with basic authentication
$response = $client->get('/status', ['auth' => ['username', 'password']]);

See the docs.

Answer 2

Unlike SOAP, REST isn't a standardized protocol so it's a bit difficult to have a "REST Client". However, since most RESTful services use HTTP as their underlying protocol, you should be able to use any HTTP library. In addition to cURL, PHP has these via PEAR:

HTTP_Request2

which replaced

HTTP_Request

A sample of how they do HTTP Basic Auth

// This will set credentials for basic auth
$request = new HTTP_Request2('http://user:[e-mail]/secret/');

The also support Digest Auth

// This will set credentials for Digest auth
$request->setAuth('user', 'password', HTTP_Request2::AUTH_DIGEST);

Answer 3

CURLOPT_USERPWD basically sends the base64 of the user:password string with http header like below:

Authorization: Basic dXNlcjpwYXNzd29yZA==

So apart from the CURLOPT_USERPWD you can also use the HTTP-Request header option as well like below with other headers:

$headers = array(
    'Content-Type:application/json',
    'Authorization: Basic '. base64_encode("user:password") // <---
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);

Answer 4

For those who don't want to use curl:

//url
$url = 'some_url'; 

//Credentials
$client_id  = "";
$client_pass= ""; 

//HTTP options
$opts = array('http' =>
    array(
        'method'    => 'POST',
        'header'    => array ('Content-type: application/json', 'Authorization: Basic '.base64_encode("$client_id:$client_pass")),
        'content' => "some_content"
    )
);

//Do request
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$json = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);

$result = json_decode($json, true);
if(json_last_error() != JSON_ERROR_NONE){
    return null;
}

print_r($result);

Answer 5

You want this:

curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);  

Zend has a REST client and zend_http_client and I'm sure PEAR has some sort of wrapper. But its easy enough to do on your own.

So the entire request might look something like this:

$process = curl_init($host);
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Content-Type: application/xml', $additionalHeaders));
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $payloadName);
curl_setopt($process, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$return = curl_exec($process);
curl_close($process);

Answer 6

The most simple and native way it's to use CURL directly.

This works for me :

<?php
$login = 'login';
$password = 'password';
$url = 'http://your.url';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$login:$password");
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);  
echo($result);