How do I configure basic authentication credentials when calling an external API?

AMDS Web Agency

I am trying to create a shipping order in bpack (bpost) API. Basic authentication is required.

The below configuration does not work. The response that I get is that "This request requires HTTP authentication".

I have successfully tested the credentials in Hoppscotch testing tool. I am sure about the url, content-type, accept, username and passphrase values.

My issue is that I do not find any online resources that covers basic authentication.

Do I need to transform/encode the username and passphrase? Could someone point me in the right direction?

Ray Deck

Basic auth is a header made of:

Authorization: Basic BASE64TOKEN

BASE64TOKEN is a string made of the username, then a colon, and then the password, with the resulting string getting with a base64_encode filter applied to it.

So you'd start with the username:password (in your case it becomes 123456:48676dc21f)

And then we base64 the result. I for demonstration, i used Cyberchef for this job: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=To_Base64('A-Za-z0-9%2B/%3D')&input=MTIzNDU2OjQ4Njc2ZGMyMWY

I got the result MTIzNDU2OjQ4Njc2ZGMyMWY=

That brings me to the final version of our Auth header:

Authorization: Basic MTIzNDU2OjQ4Njc2ZGMyMWY=

You can use cyberchef like I did to do this statically, and Xano gives you tools to do it dynamically with its filters as well.

You can learn more about Basic authentication on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Authorization

Dealing with APIs - especially authentication - is often part of the hardest 5% we focus on in our daily office hours and loom-based forums on State Change.

AMDS Web Agency

Hi Ray,

Thank you for the advice.

It worked! It feels good :-)

I have another hurdle to surpass. It is about passing XML context in the parameters.

I will check the discussions before making a new post.