How to set the authorization header using cURL

http://curl.se/docs/httpscripting.html

See part 6. HTTP Authentication

HTTP Authentication

HTTP Authentication is the ability to tell the server your username and password so that it can verify that you're allowed to do the request you're doing. The Basic authentication used in HTTP (which is the type curl uses by default) is plain text based, which means it sends username and password only slightly obfuscated, but still fully readable by anyone that sniffs on the network between you and the remote server.

To tell curl to use a user and password for authentication:

curl --user name:password http://www.example.com

The site might require a different authentication method (check the headers returned by the server), and then --ntlm, --digest, --negotiate or even --anyauth might be options that suit you.

Sometimes your HTTP access is only available through the use of a HTTP proxy. This seems to be especially common at various companies. A HTTP proxy may require its own user and password to allow the client to get through to the Internet. To specify those with curl, run something like:

curl --proxy-user proxyuser:proxypassword curl.haxx.se

If your proxy requires the authentication to be done using the NTLM method, use --proxy-ntlm, if it requires Digest use --proxy-digest.

If you use any one these user+password options but leave out the password part, curl will prompt for the password interactively.

Do note that when a program is run, its parameters might be possible to see when listing the running processes of the system. Thus, other users may be able to watch your passwords if you pass them as plain command line options. There are ways to circumvent this.

It is worth noting that while this is how HTTP Authentication works, very many web sites will not use this concept when they provide logins etc. See the Web Login chapter further below for more details on that.

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Just adding so you don't have to click-through:

curl --user name:password http://www.example.com

or if you're trying to do send authentication for OAuth 2:

curl -H "Authorization: OAuth <ACCESS_TOKEN>" http://www.example.com

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Bearer tokens look like this:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" http://www.example.com

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This worked for me:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" https://www.example.com/

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(for those who are looking for php-curl answer)

$service_url = 'https://example.com/something/something.json';
$curl = curl_init($service_url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "username:password"); //Your credentials goes here
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $curl_post_data);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false); //IMP if the url has https and you don't want to verify source certificate

$curl_response = curl_exec($curl);
$response = json_decode($curl_response);
curl_close($curl);

var_dump($response);

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For HTTP Basic Auth:

curl -H "Authorization: Basic <_your_token_>" http://www.example.com

replace _your_token_ and the URL.

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Be careful that when you using: curl -H "Authorization: token_str" http://www.example.com

token_str and Authorization must be separated by white space, otherwise server-side will not get the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION environment.

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If you don't have the token at the time of the call is made, You will have to make two calls, one to get the token and the other to extract the token form the response, pay attention to

grep token | cut -d, -f1 | cut -d\" -f4

as it is the part which is dealing with extracting the token from the response.

echo "Getting token response and extracting token"    
def token = sh (returnStdout: true, script: """
    curl -S -i -k -X POST https://www.example.com/getToken -H \"Content-Type: application/json\" -H \"Accept: application/json\" -d @requestFile.json | grep token | cut -d, -f1 | cut -d\\" -f4
""").split()

After extracting the token you can use the token to make subsequent calls as follows.

echo "Token : ${token[-1]}"       
echo "Making calls using token..."       
curl -S -i -k  -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer ${token[-1]}" https://www.example.com/api/resources 

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This example includes the following:

POST request

Header Content-Type

Header Authorization

Data flag with JSON data

Base64 encoded token

Ref-1: curl authorization header

Ref-2: curl POST request

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name”:”Johnny B. Goode”, "email”:”johnny.b.goode@mail.com"}' -H "Authorization: Bearer $(echo -n  Guitar Maestro | base64)" https://url-address.com 

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As of curl 7.61.0 you can use the --oauth2-bearer <token> option to set the correct Bearer authorization headers.

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For those doing Token-Based authentication ... make sure you do :

curl -H "AuthToken: "

instead !!

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A simple example is using parameters with authorization converted to base64

curl -XPOST 'http://exemplo.com/webhooks?Authorization=Basic%20dGVzdDoxMjM0NTYK'

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