Basic Authentication Requests

Environment

Product
Product Version	1.0.1 and above

Description

In the context of an HTTP transaction, Basic Access Authentication is a method for an HTTP user agent (for example, a web browser) to provide a user name and password when making a request. In Basic HTTP Authentication, a request contains a header field in the form of Authorization: Basic <base64 string>, where credentials are the Base64 encoding of username and password joined by a single colon(:).

In this article, we list the steps to create a request for APIs that require Authentication by using the Fiddler Everywhere Composer and provide a complete example of the procedure.

Create a Basic Authentication Request

The following steps provide an overview of the procedure used to create a basic authentication request:

1. Select the Composer tab.
2. Set the HTTP/HTTPS method to GET and add the URL in the URL field.
3. Create an object in the request Body and the user and passwd variables and their values. In this object, user and passwd are the predefined variables for the Basic Authentication.
4. Add an Authorization key to the header:
   • Encode the value of the <username>:<password> string with a Base64 converter and note the encoded value.
   • In the Headers tab, set the Key to Authorization and add the encoded <username>:<password> under Value.
   • Add a Description for the key. Click the tick to add the Authorization key.

Basic Authentication Request Example

1. In the Composer tab, set the HTTP/HTTPS method to GET and add https://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user1/pass1 in the URL field.

   

   The https://httpbin.org/basic-auth/user1/pass1 URL includes the following fields:

   • The httpbin.org HTTP request and response service.
   • The authentication scheme basic-auth.
   • The values of the user and passwd variables: user1 and pass1.

2. Create a JSON object in the Body tab:

   

   The predefined variables for Basic Authentication are user and passwd. Set their values to user1 and pass1, respectively.

3. Add the Authorization key in the Headers tab:

   • Encode the value of the <username>:<password> string with a Base64 converter. The resulting string from the encoding of user1:pass1 is dXNlcjE6cGFzczE=.
   • In Headers tab, set the Key to Authorization.
   • Set the Value to Basic dXNlcjE6cGFzczE=.
   • Add a Description for the key, and select the tick to add the Authorization key.

   

After performing all the above steps, select Execute (placed at the right side of the URL field) to send the request.

Clicking the Execute button adds two more Keys to the Headers tab named Host and Content-Length:

Following the above steps will create Basic Authentication with Fiddler Everywhere. To check, go through the Response Inspector section of the Composer. A successful request should return status 200 from the server along with the server-specific payload:

The above response is HTTPBin specific as we used it to create the Basic Authentication.